From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Fri May 14 2004 - 07:47:48 CDT
In <Pine.BSI.3.91.1040513114130.22844B-100000@spsystems.net> Henry Spencer <henry@spsystems.net> writes:
>On Thu, 13 May 2004, Charles Lindsey wrote:
>> On the other hand, if it is intended to offer the proto-article to
>> two or more injecting agents in parallel, then at least the Message-
>> Id-header MUST be present.
>> Should I also say that the Date MUST be present?
>I think so, yes. The theory is that identical message ID means identical
>article, apart from the possibility of different routes yielding different
>Path headers. So when the article is deliberately set propagating from
>more than one point, it's appropriate to try hard to make the copies as
>identical as humanly possible, including filling in all the headers you
>can reasonably fill in.
OK, I have shuffled the wording around a bit and split that paragraph
into two, so that it now says:
A proto-article is one that has been created by a posting agent and
has not yet been injected into a Netnews system by an injecting
agent. It SHOULD NOT be propagated in that form to other than
injecting agents.
A proto-article has the same format as a normal article except that
some of the following mandatory headers MAY be omitted: Message-Id-
header, Date-header, Path-header (and even From-header if the
particular injecting agent can derive that information from other
sources). However, if it is intended to offer the proto-article to
two or more injecting agents in parallel, then it is only the Path-
header that MAY be omitted. The ommitted headers MUST NOT contain
invalid values; they MUST either be correct or not present at all.
-- 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