Subject: [NNTP] HDR and OVER for multiple occurrences of headers

From: Julien ÉLIE <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 May 2010 16:31:30 +0200

Hi,

A few Netnews headers can occur more than once.  For instance the Comments:
header field defined in RFC 5536:

   The header fields Comments, Keywords, Reply-To, and Sender are used
   in Netnews articles in the same circumstances and with the same
   meanings as those specified in [RFC5322], with the added restrictions
   detailed above in Section 2.2.  Multiple occurrences of the Keywords
   header field are not permitted.

RFC 3977 defines what should be done for HDR:

   If the requested header is not present in the article, or if it is
   present but empty, a line for that article is included in the output,
   but the header content portion of the line is empty (the space after
   the article number MAY be retained or omitted).  If the header occurs
   in a given article more than once, only the content of the first
   occurrence is returned by HDR.  If any article number in the provided
   range does not exist in the group, no line for that article number is
   included in the output.

But we do not have any explanation about that for OVER.
(That fact was originally noted by Urs a few days ago.)

Is it also the first occurrence that MUST be returned by OVER?

Why isn't there the notion of concatenation of header fields?  (We could
have transformed "Comments: Line 1\r\nComments: Line 2\r\n" into
"Comments: Line 1 Line 2" in the overview field, and a similar thing
for HDR instead of losing information...)

-- 
Julien ÉLIE

« Je suis adroit de la main gauche et je suis gauche de la main droite. »
  (Raymond Devos)