ietf-nntp GROUP Responses (was: Commetns on draft-15.pdf)

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Mon Dec 31 13:10:56 PST 2001


Charles Lindsey <chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:

> P19. S9.1.1.1.1 (GROUP Responses)
> Some servers permit active file entries of the form
> 	comp.bar 00003456 4567 y
> 	comp.foo 00001234 2345 =comp.bar
> in which the group comp.foo is "aliased" onto comp.bar (and the low/high
> marks 00001234 and 2345 are actually redundant - see comp.bar for the true
> marks). In that case, if you give
> 	GROUP comp.foo
> I would expect the response
> 	211 1111 3456 4567 comp.bar

Except that isn't actually how aliasing works in INN, and I don't think
anyone else implements it.  Aliasing is *only* a set of instructions to
the server for how to file new incoming articles; it doesn't actually do
anything particularly useful for clients.  It would be nice, perhaps, to
figure out something interesting and useful for it to do for article
reading, but that belongs in an extension.

> IOW the newsgroup-name in the response is not always the same as the one
> asked for. USEFOR now has a mvgroup control message, and one of its
> allowed implementations (at the MAY level) could give rise to this
> effect.  I think you should point out that this effect is legitimate
> with servers that do aliasing, and that clients that care about such
> aliasing can look out for it.

I disagree.  I don't think this discussion is ripe until someone actually
defines an extension that does something sensible with aliasing, and even
when someone does that I don't think it's clear that this is the right way
of handling things.

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



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