From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Jul 02 2001 - 05:58:39 CDT
In <20010629153220.C19695@main.templetons.com> Brad Templeton <brad@templetons.com> writes:
>So we should say "message/partial was created to deal with older systems
>that, not yet having read this spec that says that news tools SHOULD handle
>an article of any size, are believed to sometimes perform poorly with
>large articles. Now that the spec requires modern tools to handle
>those problems in the lower level tools, the use of message/partial
>is deprecated, and support in readers is not required. On postings of
>less than a megabyte, placing the posting in a single article is
>encouraged, splitting it up is deprecated. There may be subsets of the
>net which still have technical problems and require splitting of smaller
>articels. Posters should consider the policies of any subnet or group
>in deciding whether to use a multi-article message.
Yes, but that is more or less what the present draft DOES say. The NOTE
makes it clear that message/partial is not particularly useful for texts
(for technical reasons which are given) and that it really ought not to be
necessary for large binaries because software should be able to cope with
arbitrarily large articles. The one thing it does _not_ do is mention
specific size limits.
As regards implementation, it is MUST for transports and servers (but
there is nothing special they need to do anyway, so that is a non issue).
And it is a MAY for user agents.
I do not really see any benefit in prolonging this thread. Absolutely
nobody but yourself supports mention of specific limits. Yes, there are
improvements that could be made to NNTP and a size parameter for
message/partial would be nice. But that is not for our draft, so please
pursue them through more appropriate channels.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk 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