ietf-nntp new draft available

[Charles Lindsey]

In <199812080001.SAA10373 at academ.com> sob at academ.com (Stan Barber) writes:

>I apologize for being so late with this draft. This is the one we will discuss
>tomorrow afternoon at IETF.

>ftp://ftp.academ.com/pub/nntp/ietf/nntpext.txt

>DIFFS:
>ftp://ftp.academ.com/pub/nntp/ietf/nntpext-diffs.txt

The diffs is actually longer than the original :-( .

Some comments on the three main changes:

1. '!' allowed in wildmats.
---------------------------

Yes, this is good (I have been asking for it long enough, for use in the
NEWNEWS command). However, the text describing it is hopelessly inadequate
and ambiguous. All it says is:


                                          The fifth operation uses the
            exclamation mark (!) preceding any valid expression built
            using any of the operators discussed prior to this sentence.

Nothing even to say what the semantics are of '!'. Moreover, this wording
suggests, and the syntax in Section 13 confirms, that there may be
multiple occurrences of '!' in a wildmat.

So I can presumably say:

LIST NEWSGROUPS !alt.*

with the "obviously" intended effect, but what about

LIST NEWSGROUPS alt.!binaries.*

or worse

LIST NEWSGROUPS alt.!binaries.*!erotica*

That one can be parsed in two ways, so do or do I not get to see
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.animals?

Now to the NEWNEWS command:

NEWNEWS !news.announce.conferences

presumably means every known newsgroup except the one mentioned, but

NEWNEWS news.announce.*,!news.announce.conferences

just gives me news.announce.important, news.announce.newgroups, and
news.announce.newusers (I know that, because I use it in my own feed). So
what about

NEWNEWS !news.announce.conferences,news.announce.*

Who can tell? Certainly not the draft as currently written.

I suspect that what we actually need is for '!' to be restricted to the
start of a wildmat, and for it to only remove matches already made in an
earlier entry in the case of NEWNEWS.

Or alternatively to have a ',' operator, allowing me to say

LIST NEWSGROUPS alt.*,!alt.binaries.*

But in the end I suspect that compatibility with existing INN practice is
what we really want, so it would be useful to document what that is. Is
Rich Salz listening?

Also, some more adventurous examples in section 5.1 might help.

And finally, there is a definite Bug in the syntax, where it says

newnews-command = "NEWNEWS" 1*WSP newsgroup *("," newsgroup) ...
newsgroup = parameter
parameter = 1*(%x21-FF)

Surely that should be

newsgroup = wildmat


2. 502 response.
----------------

The response
	502 Service unavailable
has now been added to the ARTICLE, HEAD, BODY and STAT commands. I note
that some other commands allow
	502 no permission
(OVER and PAT). I think "no permission" might be more appropriate for the
ARTICLE lot as well, since that is the actual situation in which INN gives
it (you find an article with NEWNEWS, and when you try to retrieve it you
find it is a net.* article which you are not allowed to see).

Also, I would have expected a 502 response from the GROUP command in such
a situation.


3. Distributions.
-----------------

This optional parameter has disappeared from the NEWNEWS command (as
promised).

However, you should know that the USEFOR group has been trying to
strengthen the Distribution header in grandson-of-1036. One can see
applications of it if, for example, mass cancellers and Nocem-issuers
could include a Distribution header indicating which major hierarchies
were included in each particular article. Trouble is, if you are
interested in Nocems for a small hierarchy (like uk.*) you still need to
download the whole of news.lists.filters, which is a massive job for a
telephone-line feed, and if you want to see cancels you have to call for
the whole of control.cancel.

However, one of Brad's pet ideas is for individual newsreaders to be
configurable as to what distributions they will accept, and that would
need a Distribution parameter in the ARTICLE command and friends :-( .

Note also that USEFOR has also proposed negative distributions (with '!'
in front).


4. Miscellaneous.
-----------------

I find the description of the LISTGROUP command a little vague. Are the
article numbers returned supposed to be on 1 line, on on successive lines?

And the PAT command does not actually say that the 'pat's are wildmats
(though the syntax in section 13 does). It would be better to say
"[wildmat [wildmat...]]" in 9.4.10. ALso, it is not clear what is to
happen if there are more than one of them. Do the headers returned have to
satisfy ALL of them or ONE of them?

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Email:     chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk  Web:   http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
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