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Re: Lines count in USEFOR
Julien ÉLIE <julien@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> Ah yes, that final CRLF is not added by me but by my posting agent.
> The Lines header field indicates the number of lines in the <body>
> (as defined in [RFC5322]) of the article.
> body = (*(*998text CRLF) *998text) / obs-body
> Then USEFOR uses a subset of the e-mail body. And the definition of
> the Lines: header is right for that subset but wrong in the general case
> (which may be possible in an NNTP extension).
Yeah, I'd say that's correct.
In practice, the value of Lines varies so much (it's common for user
agents to set it prior to adding the signature file, for instance) that
being off by a line is minor compared to other problems.
> The impression I said I had was when I read "Historically, this header
> field was used by the NNTP [RFC3977] overview facility, but its use for
> this purpose is now deprecated.".
> It looked to me, when reading that sentence, that this header could
> still be stored in the overview defined by RFC 3977. Which is not the
> case in OVER answers.
> As you explained, the sentence hints at LIST OVERVIEW.FMT.
> Yet, something seems to be wrong: "this header field"? Shouldn't it
> be "this header name"? Because the value is never used.
The value *used* to be used. Old versions of INN, for instance, would
copy the Lines header into the overview rather than doing their own
count and would only do their own count if there were no existing Lines
header. That's the behavior that USEFOR is saying is deprecated. It's
actually more than that; RFC 3977 outright forbids it.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@xxxxxxxxxxxx) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>