Brad Templeton <brad(_at_)templetons(_dot_)com> writes:
As I have indicated before, there is no purpose for message/partial in
USENET news, and thus no reason to do a news/partial form.
It's not worth even getting into this discussion with anyone who hasn't
read the *huge* recent discussion of this topic on news.software.nntp,
which covered the various issues around multipart posts on Usenet in more
detail than has ever been talked about on usenet-format. There are a lot
of issues concerning multipart posts that are very peculiar to Usenet,
such as active attempts to corrupt posts by injecting faked fragments,
news server issues with handling and reassembling large files correctly,
and the *much* higher likelihood that one or more segments will be lost in
transit.
As usual, backward compatibility issues end up being significant in a lot
of places. Any theoretical solution is pointless unless the people
posting binaries use it.
And yes, article fragmentation and reassembly at the NNTP protocol level
was one of the things that was discussed (extensively).
--
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>