ietf-nntp Minor corrections to 11.4

[Russ Allbery]

I'm currently redoing the parsing code for dates in NEWGROUPS and NEWNEWS
in INN and ran across a few problems with the current draft:

     11.4 NEWGROUPS

       NEWGROUPS date time [GMT|UTC]

       A list of newsgroups created since <date and time> MUST be
       listed in the same format as the LIST command.

       The date is sent as 6 or 8 digits in the format [XX]YYMMDD,
       where XX is the first two digits of the year, YY is the last
       two digits of the year, MM is the two digits of the month
       (with leading zero, if appropriate),

Consider replacing with "MM is the two-digit number of the month (with a
leading zero, if appropriate)".  I suppose it isn't really necessary to
say that January is 1 and December is 12.

       and DD is the day of the
       month (with leading zero, if appropriate). If the first two
       digits of the year are not specified, the year is to be taken
       from the current century if YY is smaller than or equal to the
       current year, otherwise the year is from the previous century.

That should say "if YY is smaller than or equal to the last two digits of
the current year," I assume.

Add after this paragraph:

       Clients SHOULD use the eight-digit date form with four digits for
       the year.  The six-digit form is provided solely for backwards
       compatibility.

I'd even be comfortable with making that a MUST, but existing practice
definitely supports a SHOULD.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>