From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Mar 18 2004 - 08:16:19 CST
In <40584453.4090206@erols.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
>Charles Lindsey wrote:
>> True, but why should it be necessary to know which are the immediate
>> predecessors?
>Various possibilities:
But all secondary reasons.
I was more concerned to know whether that information was essential for
threading, which is the main application for the References header.
>> Actually, it is rather easy in NNTP, by making use of the overview
>> information, which is what newsreaders usually do. There is still the
>> problem that some earlier messages from the thread may have expired.
>Are References fields universally available via overview (at
>least one person recently active on this mailing list has said
>that that is not the case)?
It is very rare to find an NNTP server that does not implement the
overview. For those that do, providing the full contents of the References
header is a MUST.
The upcoming NNTP standard (draft-ietf-nntpext-base-21.txt) puts the
matter beyond all doubt.
>If we're going to address followups to multiple messages, we're
>going to need to examine and modify the draft text related to
>Newsgroups, Followup-To, Distribution, etc.; the content of
>those fields may differ among the multiple articles being
>followed up.
Yes you raise some interesting issues which would need to be taken into
account. I do not think they are insuperable. I would imagine that the way
one would construct a followup would be to followup to the first article,
and then to instruct the newsreader to bring other articles into the pool.
So the headers would start out as from the first article, and then some
rule would be needed on how to merge the later ones (though by that stage
the user is well in charge, and in practical cases the articles are likely
to be from the same thread with the same groups and distributions).
Note that I am not rushing to include such a scheme in the present draft.
Somebody raised it, and it is a job that needs doing, so it was worth some
discussion. And if there is an obvious and simple way to do it, then it
might be included. But we really need to hear from someone who has
actually implemented a full threader.
>article C may have
> From: e@f.gov
> Newsgroups: foo
> Followup-To: poster
> Subject: thingamajig
> Distribution: uk
> Mail-Copies-To: nobody
>Side issue:
>Is the combination of
> Followup-To: poster
>and
> Mail-Copies-To: nobody
>in article C legal and semantically sensible? The Usefor draft
>doesn't address those issues (even for the case of article
>C considered in isolation). Perhaps the two fields should be
>combined into a single field:
No, it is too late to do that now.
The Mail-Copies-To-header is far from ideal, but it arose from 'folklore'
rather than any formal design effort, so all we could do was to codify
(and tidy up) the existing practice.
But you are right in that section 8.6 does not address the
Followup-To: poster situation at all, and it ought to. I have made a note
to attend to that.
As to the conflict between 'poster' and 'nobody', I am not particularly
bothered. If the original poster creates such a stupid situation, then the
worst that will happen when a 2nd poster follows up will be that he sees a
warning "The OP has requested no mail to be sent to him; do you want to
send it regardless?". Whereupon the 2nd poster should say "The OP is an
expletive-deleted idiot and I don't see why I should bother with him".
-- 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@clerew.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