Re: Lines count in USEFOR

Russ Allbery <[email protected]> Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:44:36 -0800

Newsgroups	gmane.ietf.usenet.format
Organization	The Eyrie
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Julien ÉLIE <[email protected]> writes:

> If I read RFC 5322:

>    body   =   (*(*998text CRLF) *998text) / obs-body

> Isn't the final *998text counting for a line?
> I believe the line count is the number of CRLF separators in the <body>
> PLUS ONE.
> (Unless I'm mistaken by the definition of the body?)

NNTP as presently written cannot transfer an article that does not end in
a CRLF.  In practice, clients will just add a CRLF to any article that
doesn't already end in one, since otherwise they can't POST.

By the time we introduce some method of transfer that can handle arbitrary
data and therefore doesn't have this problem, I suspect the Lines header
will be completely obsolete.

> The second part of the paragraph seems unclear.  I am under the
> impression that RFC 3977 says we can use Lines: in the overview but
> USEFOR -- posterior to RFC 3977 -- deprecates that use.  This header
> field is not used by OVER in RFC 3977.

RFC 3977 says that you can *call* the :lines metadata element Lines:, but
it's still the metadata element.  Per RFC 3977, the Lines header is no
longer used to provide the basic overview information.  I think that's
what's referred to here.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email protected])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>