From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Fri Nov 05 1999 - 07:14:56 CST
In <yld7tp1tty.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
>I've seen control messages issued with just "m" before, although spelling
>out "moderated" is more common. As you can see, INN historically accepts
>*anything* else as indicating that the group be unmoderated.
OK, INN might accept that (CNews certainly wouldn't), but I think it
safest to stick with the full "moderated" in our text.
>> So is there support for making "For your newsgroups file:" optional as
>> suggested?
>I'm in favor of that, if we're going to be stuck with the MIME parse
>anyway. The name of the section already dictates its contents.
>Downgrading the MUST to a SHOULD for backwards compat makes a lot of sense
>to me; it means that people can drop the practice when it's no longer
>necessary without being non-compliant.
OK. I am minded to do that. Is everyone else happy with it?
>[ propagation rules for newgroup messages ]
>Not sure. In general, we haven't talked about propagation rules, and it's
>a bit outside the scope of the draft; on the other hand, it *is* an
>interoperability concern that affects the article format, since it affects
>what people put in the Newsgroups header of newgroup messages. And people
>have had a hard time convincing people not to do things like put
>news.admin.hierarchies in the Newsgroups header of all their control
>messages for some obscure hierarchy that the people carrying only news.*
>don't want.
I have now written, in 7.1:
The Newsgroups header of each control message MUST include the
newsgroup-name(s) for the group(s) affected (i.e. groups to be created,
modified or removed, or containing articles to be canceled). This is to ensure
that the message progagates to all sites which receive (or would receive) that
group(s). It MAY include other newsgroup-names so as to improve propagation
(but this practice should be regarded as exceptional rather than normal).
Is that OK?
>[ mvgroup ]
>>> Ew... I wouldn't want to touch an implementation of this. Any way you
>>> do it will cause serious client-side weirdness for users who were
>>> reading both groups.
>> Well that is why is says "MAY", backed up by some pretty unpleasant
>> "MUST"s. OTOH, I guess that the users are going to complain bitterly if
>> it isn't done :-( . Do you want me to put in a NOTE warning that users
>> should not harbour such expectations?
>A NOTE pointing out that there basically is no sane way to do this and
>preserve the full semantics of NNTP article numbers from both groups may
>be in order, although that's a bit outside the normal scope of our draft.
I have now written:
NOTE: Due to the severe difficulties of implementing this merging, those
proposing to merge existing groups using this control message should be
aware that it may not be implemented on many (if not most) sites,
and should therefore be prepared for such disruption as may ensue.
>[ checkgroups scope ]
>> The body of the message has the Content-Type
>> "application/news-checkgroups". It asserts that the newsgroups it lists
>> are the only newsgroups in the specified hierarchies. If there is an
>> invalidation, it asserts that the hierarchies it names no longer contain
>> any newsgroups.
>Did I miss a definition of what an invalidation is supposed to be? I
>still don't really understand the concept.
The only definition hitherto has been that in Son-of-1036, as reflected in
our new text as quoted above. The "feature" is only for removing complete
hierarchies (such as mod.*) and has hardly been widely used :-) . I say
remove it, with a NOTE explaining how to do it with ckscope and an empty
list.
>>>> NOTE: The checkgroups nessage is intended to synchronize the
>>>> list of newsgroups stored by a serving agent, and their
>>>> descriptions, with the lists stored by other serving agents
>>>> throught the network. However, it would be inadvisable for the
>>>> serving agent actually to create or delete any newsgroups
>>>> without first obtaining the approval of its administrators for
>>>> such proposed actions.
>> Have you never seen a checkgroups in which the issuer had inadvertently
>> left out half of the hierarchy?
>So you put a consistency check into the checkgroups processing and refuse
>to automatically process a message that affects more than 5% of the
>hierarchy or something. I don't think it's a good idea to say servers
>shouldn't act automatically on authenticated checkgroups if they only
>affect a handfull of groups; given how busy most news administrators are,
>it would probably be much better if existing software did this.
Well I have changed the "would" to a "might".
But hands up any newsadmin on this list who lets a checkgroups message
(even when authenticated) go through automatically? Or would do so even
with a 5% check as suggested?
>If the cancel arrives before the article, and cancel verification is
>turned on, INN doesn't honor the cancel. This is generally not what you
>want at all for spam cancels, and spam cancels frequently arrive before
>the article. This is one of the major reasons why people turn it off.
>If the article arrived before the cancel *and* cancel checks have been
>specifically turned on, INN takes the Sender: header of the cancel, or the
>From: header if there's no Sender:, and compares it to the Sender: header
>of the article, or the From: header if there's no Sender:, and only honors
>the cancel if they match. Third-party cancellers therefore generally put
>the From/Sender of the article they're cancelling into the *Sender* header
>of their cancel.
OK. I now say:
"In order for a cancel message to remove an article, the addr-spec
contained in the Sender header of the original article (or one of the
addr-specs in its From header if the Sender header is absent) SHOULD match
that contained in the Sender header of the cancel message (or one of the
addr-specs in its From header if the Sender header is absent).
NOTE: Both the From header and any Approved header MUST relate to the
entity responsible for issuing the cancel message."
First question: Do those words match current INN behaviour (note SHOULD in
place of MUST). Particularly when multiple addresses are in the From
header?
Second question: Do we want to say even that much?
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Voice/Fax: +44 161 437 4506 Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5