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rfcerrata
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1989-06-27
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96 lines
.TL
Errors in RFC 1036
.AU
Geoff Collyer
.AI
Department of Statistics
University of Toronto
.SH
Introduction
.PP
RFC 1036,
the standard
.I "du jour"
for the format of Usenet (netnews) messages
contains significant errors,
enumerated below.
References are made to
RFC 850,
the previous netnews message format standard.
.SH
Header order insignificant
.PP
Between
RFC 850
and
RFC 1036,
a sentence stating that the order of message headers is insignificant
has fallen out of the standard.
This may be a reflection of the reality that
B 2.10
news did indeed care about the order
of
.B From:
and
.B Path: .
.SH
``Re:'' is only three characters
.PP
One sees the contradiction
``the four characters "Re:"''
repeatedly;
there should be a space after the colon.
.SH
cmsg incorrectly described
.PP
Similary,
RFC 1036
claims that a
.B Subject:
prefix of
``cmsg''
will be interpreted as denoting a control message;
the correct prefix is
``cmsg\ ''
(including a space).
.SH
Xref is transmitted
.PP
RFC 1036
says that
.B Xref:
headers should not be transmitted,
yet they are stored on disk as part of message headers,
so they will be transmitted by both B and C news.
The standard appears to be too strict.
.SH
cancels should propagate always
.PP
RFC 1036
claims that
.I cancel
control messages should stop propagating when their target messages
are not present;
it would improve the efficacy of
.I cancel s
to propagate them anyway.
.SH
ihave/sendme not documented
.PP
The description of the ihave/sendme protocol is so vague
as to be useless to an implementor.
See the
C news
documentation for an adequate description of the protocol.
The description in
RFC 1036
also contains an error:
.I remotesys
is not optional;
given that there may be multiple message-ids preceding it,
there would be no way
(other than ad-hocery)
to tell if the final argument were a message-id
or a
.I remotesys .