ietf-nntp Summary of IETF42 meeting

Charles Lindsey chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk
Mon Aug 31 04:08:25 PDT 1998


In <199808300419.XAA11668 at owlman.academ.com> sob at owlman.academ.com (Stan Barber) writes:
>The working group decided that the "common practices" document should now
>be advanced to the IESG for IETF last-call immediately. There were a number
>of small changes for the "rfc977bis" document. This includes adding the
>negate functionality (using "!") to wildmat, 

Ah! This seems good. Does it mean that I may now use the NEWNEWS command
so as to retrieve, say, all of news.*, excluding news.lists.*? This is, of
course possible (and useful) in the current RFC977. Is there a text
somewhere with the details?

>dropping the use of distributions
>from NEWNEWS, 

This I am not so sure about. Granted it may mean implementations do not
need to retrieve headers when deciding what to send, there are also some
applications now ruled out.

For example, some groups (news.lists.filters, "control.cancel") are huge.
I might only want to see those articles relevant to a particular
hierarchy. It might be useful for the professional cancellers and NOCEMers
to include distributions in their articles indicating which hierarchies
were affected. Then I could just ask to see those with distribution "!alt".

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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