ietf-nntp <distributions> parameter to NEWGROUPS and NEWNEWS

[Russ Allbery]

I assume that the general consensus was to kill this?

Both the RFC 977 description and the INN implementation, now that I'm
looking at it, is... bizarre to say the least.  At least whoever wrote the
INN support read RFC 977 (and I can see why) as saying that the angle
brackets are actually part of the syntax, so INN expects things like:

    NEWGROUPS 20000831 000000 UTC <comp,rec>

For NEWGROUPS, INN implements this exactly as described in RFC 977, namely
by finding the first hierarchy component of the new newsgroups and
comparing it against the list of provided "distributions" and only
returning new newsgroups that match.  This is actually oddly useful, as
it's functionally like having wildmat support in NEWGROUPS to select what
groups you care about except that you can only match on the first
component of the newsgroup.

Does anyone have any idea if any client is actually using this?

For NEWNEWS, INN treats the distribution list as real distributions (and
therefore opens each article to find the Distribution header -- bleh).  It
still requires that it be in angle brackets, though.

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