ietf-nntp Wildmats (was: draft posted)

[Charles Lindsey]

In <ylg06zhjyo.fsf_-_ at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:


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

>> Last thing I remember is that Clive had two texts (both should still be
>> on his website) and we had reached consensus on the shorter one, without
>> the character classes.

>I'm including that change for reference.  It seems fine to me.  Does
>anyone have any objections with making the following changes in the draft?

>(Note that the mention of LIST NEWSGROUPS being very efficient with a
>single group name has since been removed from the draft and shouldn't be
>reintroduced by this change, and the other changes to the text elsewhere
>in the document should be reviewed against -14.)

Yes, that all seems fine. It is pretty obvious which sentences should be
removed if you don't want to say anything about the efficiency of single
group names (though I still believe that they are more efficient).

I have one further nit, mentioned below. Not to be changed for this draft,
but we should discuss it.

>  NEWNEWS wildmat date time [GMT]

>  The message-ids of all articles added to a set of newsgroups
>  since the given date-time will be listed. The set consists
>  of all newsgroups whose name matches the wildmat.
>  The format of the listing will be one message-id per line, as
>  though text were being sent. Each message-id MUST appear only
>  once in a response. The order of the response has no specific
>  significance and may vary from response to response in the
>  same session. Date and time are in the same format as the
>  NEWGROUPS command.

My question is why that "MUST appear only once in a response" is there.
Does any harm actually arise if it is repeated? The worst that can happen
is that the (sucking) client fails to notice that it has already asked for
this article once before, asks for it again, and then finds it doesn't
need it after all. A little inefficient, perhaps, but nothing actually
breaks.

The reason I raise it is that the USEFOR group has been discussing various
schemes for allowing groups of related articles (such as regularly posted
FAQs) such that one unchanging ID could be used to retrieve the "latest"
in the series. In the event, USEFOR is not proceeding with such schemes,
but they remain a possibility for a future extension. And, in some
versions of these schemes, a given ID might, occasionally, have appeared
twice in a NEWNEWS list.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5