Eric.Burger@centigram.com
Thu, 20 Jan 2000 20:02:15 -0600
How's this for a high-level description of the partial delivery mechanism:
PNDN is simply an extension to DSN. The extension to DSN is that the
per-recipient-fields get a new, possibly repeating set of fields. Those
fields are the per-part-fields of draft-ema-vpim-pndn-00.txt. The
action-field and status-field for each part becomes part-action-field and
part-status-field.
This preserves the mechanisms of DSN.
Open questions:
1. A general principle for Internet protocols is field order doesn't
matter. In the above proposal, all body parts belonging to a given
per-recipient-field block must be contiguous. That is, we cannot use a
blank line to separate the per-part-fields, as proposed in
draft-ema-vpim-pndn-00.txt. This is because existing DSN implementations
would interpret the blank line to be a separator for the
per-recipient-fields, not per-part-fields. One solution is to require the
part-action-field precede any other per-part-fields. The choice of
part-action-field is because it's one of the two required fields. Is this
a reasonable solution?
2. What should we do for the action-field and status-field for the message
as a whole? If we have a critical-part indicator, then it's easy: if the
critical part got delivered, then the PNDN is an informational message;
otherwise, the PNDN is a failure notice. If there isn't a critical-part
indicator, then there are three choices:
a) Always return failure
b) Always return success
c) Let the developer choose what's best
As a developer with a marketing department, I know which result we'll
return :-) Actually, given that reality, I'm leaning to have PNDN be a
success/informational message, unless there's a critical-part indicator.
How does this fly?
TIA for your input.
-- - Eric Burger <mailto:e.burger@ieee.org> +1 301 212 3320
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