Subject: #1042 USEFOR Newsgroups folding

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 17:33:53 +0200

In reviewing the discussion of comments in the References header (#1029), I 
discovered that I had failed to create a ticket for the separate issue of 
folding the Newsgroups header.

I have filed the ticket below. Given the experiment and the result, I 
suggest that we say that agents SHOULD NOT generate folded Newsgroups 
headers, and that the valid reason to generate them is to test whether they 
propagate.

Makes sense?

                     Harald
------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: USEFOR 3.1.5: Newsgroups folding?

USEFOR -04 3.1.5 currently says:

newsgroups = "Newsgroups:" SP newsgroup-list CRLF

newsgroup-list = [FWS] newsgroup-name
*( [FWS] "," [FWS] newsgroup-name ) [FWS]

.....

NOTE: Observe that the syntax does not allow comments within the
Newsgroups header; this is to simplify processing by relaying and
serving agents which have a requirement to process this header
extremely rapidly.

It places no restriction on folding in the Newsgroups header.
It's not clear that there is consensus in the group on this.

On June 10, Charles Lindsey said:

I have just submitted an article with the following headers to a server
using INN 2.4.1. It certainly got stored on that server. I invite you
all to see whether it arrived on any of the groups it was sent to, and
especially indications of how long it took and the route it took would
be interesting, since propagation using only INN 2.4+ servers may be
rather slow. If you do not see it in the named groups, it might be worth
looking to see if your server has filed it under "junk".

Newsgroups: man.test,
uk.test,
misc.test,
de.test
Path: chl
From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Subject: Testing folded newsgroups.
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 18:32:18 GMT
Lines: 14

It would also be helpful if others who have relaying privileges would
try the same experiment.

On June 12, Richard Clayton reported:

the article

>Message-ID: <[email-masked]>

is not currently (almost 2 days later) available on news.demon.co.uk
(well connected UK ISP server), news.mit.edu (MIT's server) or
news.cam.ac.uk (Cambridge University's server)

retention is sufficient for the article to be seen if it managed to
reach these servers by any flood-fill route (direct routes would have
meant that it arrived in seconds)

>It would also be helpful if others who have relaying privileges would
try
>the same experiment.

the existing result speaks for itself

"Broken" articles like this don't propagate at all well :(

hence any suggestion that folded newsgroups header lines are current
state of the art (rather than some future possibility) seems premature

---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 18:45:55 +0200

> Makes sense?

Yes.  As far as I'm concerned somebody should replace all the
utter dubious [FWS] directly after the colon-space by a *WSP,
dito all [FWS] directly before the CRLF.  I don't believe in
an optional "F"-folding explicitly "verboten" by a MUST NOT.

                        Bye, Frank