ietf-nntp draft-ietf-nntpext-base-17

[Charles Lindsey]

In <ylptodc4bh.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>Charles Lindsey <chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:

>> But I would certainly expect the newsgroups file to be a superset of the
>> active file, even if there were no descriptions for some groups in it.

>Then you would expect incorrectly, if you were using normal, currently
>deployed news servers.

>I think the question is whether we should outlaw existing (sloppy)
>practice or not.  My inclination is to say no.  I don't think there's any
>question about what the existing practice is like, namely that LIST ACTIVE
>is the canonical list of groups, LIST ACTIVE.TIMES is a subset of that
>list, and LIST NEWSGROUPS is some other collection of groups that may be a
>superset, a subset, or just a disjoint set from LIST ACTIVE (but gets
>closer and closer to a matching set on servers that pay a lot of attention
>to it).

I think the active file is for technical stuff, of interest to software
and newsadmins. A normal user who wants to know what newsgroups are
available to him should be using the newsgroups file (which is supposed to
be the user-friendly version). Therefore it SHOULD (if present at all)
include at least all the groups available to him on his server.

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