Re: [Pan-users] Articles Pan Can't Read

[Duncan]

Mark S Bilk posted on Wed, 10 Aug 2011 22:23:02 -0700 as excerpted:

> Duncan, many thanks for this info!  Just what I need for easing into
> this debugging session.  It's going to be a fun night -- only one, I
> hope!

... As a pan user you should know better than to top post, and you /did/ 
edit well, so it wouldn't have been as if people had to scroll thru pages 
of quote to see your reply. =:^)

Meanwhile, you may be well into it by now, perhaps even finished, but 
FWIW, you just provoked a re-read of the appropriate RFC, here, and it 
seems they've updated it since I last took a good hard look at it.

The current NNTP RFC is #3977, dated October 2006, to be found here:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3977

FWIW, I was correct as far as I went (my memory wasn't incorrect, just 
lacking in detail), but while an article can be requested by either 
Message-ID or article (sequence) number, there's actually a number of 
commands that can be used to do so.  Section 6.2 details most of them, 
with 6.1 additionally detailing the LAST and NEXT commands, which can be 
used for navigation to the previous/next article relative to the current 
one, so article numbers OR message-IDs don't actually have to be 
specified if navigation is entirely relative/sequential.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3977#section-6.2

For those who were already familiar with the earlier versions, RFCs 977 
and 2980, the last appendix, Appendix D, details the changes from them.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3977#appendix-D

In general, it's mostly small tweaks and new options, but of interest to 
me, the original 7-bit-ASCII charset is now 8-bit UTF-8 (of which 7-bit 
ASCII forms a subset, so messages complying with the old version 
automatically comply with the new one as well, in this regard), 
pipelining support is now mandatory (yay!), as are Message-IDs, 4-digit-
years are permitted, the LIST command has been extended (the original 
available as LIST ACTIVE), a new CAPABILITIES command can be used to 
determine what's actually supported, LISTGROUP is adopted from 2980 and 
expanded, and XHDR and XOVER are now simply HDR and OVER.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman