Draft specification for future X-Trace header

[Marco d'Itri]

On Jul 04, Olaf Titz <olaf at bigred.inka.de> wrote:

 >Any news system which an article crosses MAY insert an X-Trace header.
 >However, this SHOULD NOT be done in the normal forwarding of articles,
 >but only at injection points and gateways (of any kind).
I think this should really, really be a MUST NOT.

 >header          = "X-Trace:" LWSP systemid *(LWSP item)
 >LWSP            = linear-white-space
Does LWSP contains newlines? (To allow folding.)

 >The first /ctoken/ SHOULD always be the base64 encoding of the original
 >mail's Message-ID. If no such header is present, the news Message-ID
 >generated by the gateway should be used. All gateways SHOULD use this
 >information to prevent loops.
I don't think X-Trace should be extended to do that, it looks very
unclean.
If Message-ID munging is a problem, the Message-IDs should be munged
the same way by all gateway. Look at News::Gateway about this topic.

 >Any X-Trace header present in an article coming in, whether by POST or
 >regular feed, MUST NOT be changed or deleted. One additional X-Trace
 >header MAY be added. An article SHOULD NOT be rejected just because of
 >the presence of an X-Trace header. (Note this is changed from current
 >practice.)
I don't agree. Please provide a rationale.
How could people find the right header then?

 >  This information can be used for rate-limiting. However, if more
 >  than one X-Trace header is present, a rejection caused by comparing
 >  only one of them SHOULD NOT be noted in the article history (because
 >  it may have come from a legitimate POST feed).
POST newsfeeds are evil.

-- 
ciao,
Marco