ietf-nntp XHDR versus XPAT

[USENET news manager <[e-mail]>]

I was just re-reading past mail to the ietf-nntp list and noticed a 
response from Stan Barber to Ben Polk:

>> Where are XBATCH and XHDR?  Ah, I mean BATCH and HDR.  :)  I think they're 
>> pretty widely used these days.
>> 
>
>XHDR is just a subset of XPAT. There is no need for both.

I must have overlooked that at the time (the original message covered other
points as well), and am amazed that it didn't provoke objections. I'm not
sure about the relative timing, but from my perspective I encountered XHDR
quite a while before XPAT, and while I'm not aware of any newsreaders that
depend on XPAT, there certainly are  newsreaders which assume XHDR is
available as a de facto standard command, and will not work without it.

If we were planning an ideal world from scratch, it would be fine to say
that since one proposed command was a superset of another, the less powerful
one isn't needed. When the less powerful command has been around longer and
newsreaders expect to find it, I don't think it can be ignored and suggest
it needs to be retained (with the same considerations applying to it having
an X-name as for XOVER).

I don't know how widely XHDR is implemented by servers or required by
newsreaders, but it was effectively a mandatory patch to NNTP 1.5.11 (since
various widely-used newsreaders required it), is provided by INN 1.4 and
hence I presume Netscape's News Server as standard, and as far as I can see
at a quick glance through the source code is assumed to be available by xrn
7.00, trn 3.6, and tin 1.22.

I have less strong feelings about XPAT, but it is certainly used (e.g. 
NewsWatcher).

                                John Line
-- 
Cambridge University Computing Service - USENET news manager. Usually John Line
[e-mail]    (alias {newsmaster,news,usenet}@news.cam.ac.uk)