Re: PING/PONG

[Kaspar Landsberg <kl@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On Sun, Feb 07, 1999 at 06:52:07PM -0500, Christophe Kalt wrote:
| Why do you email about this again? I've already told you in
| private that PING/PONG is following RFC and nothing will be
| changed.

because a) you told me something about the sending of ircd related mails
privately to you, b) i want others to express their view too and c) i
still want the old behavior back.

| | The behavior of the server returning the arguments from a received PING in
| | its PONG has been this way the last 10 years or so (as i´ve been told).
| | And it´s still like this on most major irc.nets out there, except (of
| | course) on IRCNet. The IRCNet ircd just returns "PONG :<nick of the
| | originating client of the PING>" instead of "PONG :<args supplied from the
| | originating client of the PING>".
| 
| WRONG,
| it replies ":prefix PONG <server name> [:]<nickname>"

okok, you got me. I wasn´t exact on the syntax. The quintessence of it
should be clear tho.

| | Some say returning the arguments of the PING within the PONG would violate
| | the RFC. This is not true. The RFC says:
| | 
| |   Any client which receives a PING message must respond to <server1>
| |   (server which sent the PING message out) as quickly as possible with
| |   an appropriate PONG message to indicate it is still there and alive.
| | 
| | "appropriate" is not defined! Which means you can define it any way you
| | want.
| 
| WRONG again, it is defined by the syntax for the PONG
| message.
| 
| |       Returning the arguments within the PONG message would be completely
| | within the proctol.
| 
| WRONG once more.
| read section 4.6.3 of the RFC.

Then, again, ircd should be fully RFC compliant, which it is not. Why is
RFC (the RFC being really outdated as everyone knows) complicancy
sometimes so important to you and sometimes not at all?

| | Or is there another way of asking the server whether it´s still alive and
| | then get back a unique ID from it which the client sent to it?
| 
| Why do you need a unique ID? answer: you DON'T.
| send "PING" to the server, you'll get a "PONG" back if it is
| alive, or won't if it is not. (if it is not, the TCP
| connection will be torn down by your OS anyway).

I need it because i need it. It´s for sequencing the whole thing if you
really need to know that.

The point is: I want the server to return arguments i provided. You don´t
have to know why. And there used to be an elegant way to do it which does
not exist anymore in the current implementation. And the only reason for
which it seems to have been removed is RFC compliancy whereas the current
implementation violates the RFC in other ways? Common!

| | If not, then please get the server back to the traditionnal behavior.
| 
| NO.

I think (and i´m not the only one) it´s unreasonable to break the old
PING/PONG behavior. And if you really insist on keeping it the way it is
then clients will have to get their arguments returned in some other,
uglier and more expansive way.

Please think about it again.

Bye, Kasi

-- 
Kaspar Landsberg, <kl@xxxxxxxxxxx>