ietf-nntp "Common NNTP Extensions" document updated

[Vincent Archer]

[That's my last intervention on this subject, because it's increasingly
 obvious that we'll never agree on this]
On Mon, Dec 01, 1997 at 04:28:03PM +0000, Jon Ribbens wrote:
> These two are the same thing. If the command is not a MUST part of the
> protocol, then client software cannot rely on its existence. This isn't

Right now, no client software can rely on its existence. Saying "It is
mandated!" will not result in those servers magically implementing
NEWNEWS, since the current document define it as mandatory, and
quite obviously, many sites don't allow it.

> just some optimisation, where the client can "fall back" to some other
> method if NEWNEWS isn't available. Clients are written right from the
> start on the NEWNEWS model or the article-numbers model.

That's right. And, unless you have strong reasons to believe that you
will only encounter NEWNEWS-enabled servers, you can only assume that
you will have article-number articles.

> And I say again: NEWNEWS exists and is in widespread use today. Fixing

Define "widespread". In the world I live in, 100% of the servers I can
contact and read from (and that's more than a dozen) reply me:

502 NEWNEWS command disabled by administrator

I'm sure that there are part of the world where you can get a reply out
of a NEWNEWS. But how many servers out there are running INN?

> INN so that it implements NEWNEWS properly isn't difficult, and is
> a far better solution than deciding to break existing, working client
> software instead.

Currently, this software doesn't interact with INN anyway. How many %
of the news sites around the world are running INN out-of-the-box
currently? Quite obviously, these sites' clients do not need NEWNEWS
to operate.

Your biggest worry seems to be that, once the NEWNEWS is no longer
mandatory, your servers will stop implementing it - to which I'll
reply that XOVER has never been mandatory, which hasn't stopped more
and more servers from implementing it :)

Mine is that, once developpers start removing mandatory parts (NEWNEWS)
of the protocol from their server, they'll start to think it's equally
uncorrect to remove other, maybe more useful parts, from the protocol.

-- 
Vincent ARCHER  -=-=-  Herve Schauer Consultants -=-=-   archer at hsc.fr
Tel: +33 1 41 40 97 00                          Fax: +33 1 41 40 97 09
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