ietf-nntp Re: nntp-extensions draft-ballou-nntpsrch-00.txt

[Chris Newman]

On Tue, 10 Dec 1996, Brian Hernacki wrote:
> Interesting reading Nat. After the feedback we received, Ben and I had
> also been changing our draft to have SEARCH return overview-like data
> directly (without virtual groups). For demand searching (not profiles)
> it seems to be a cleaner approach..and people seemd to like this lighter
> weight approach to SEARCH better. 
> ... 
>  o seems like it's trying to hard to be IMAP

This is a feature.  If NNTP SEARCH has gratuitous incompatibilities with
IMAP4, I suspect there will be a lot of opposition.  The reader subset of
NNTP and IMAP4 are trying to solve the same problems, so they should be 
solved in the same way as much as possible.

I think Nat has exactly the right idea -- take IMAP's SEARCH command,
remove the stuff that doesn't apply to NNTP, then add the cross-group
search using a syntax that could be added to IMAP4 via an extension.  Do
it that way, and you don't have to fight the character set battle or
address any of the other problems that IMAP has already solved.