ietf-nntp LISTGROUP

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Russ Allbery said:
>> Why don't we change LISTGROUP to LISTARTICLES and require the 211 response
>> to be the same as that from GROUP.

>  * We had to rename XOVER and XHDR (not XPAT; we haven't done anything
>    with XPAT) because they started with X.  Since we were renaming them
>    anyway, we fiddled with them.

True.

But we fiddled with LISTGROUP even without renaming it.

>  * LISTGROUP is not actually that generally useful enough of a command to
>    put a lot of effort into reinventing and force client upgrades to use
>    the new command.  My intuition is that not many people use LISTGROUP,
>    since one can get the same information from OVER and the client usually
>    has to send OVER anyway.

The archives (back from 1996) disagree with you. People wanted LISTGROUP
because it's much simpler/faster than using OVER or HDR to get the same
information.

> Basically, I think this would be putting way too much effort into an issue
> that's not actually significant or important to client authors, and we
> should just leave well enough alone.  Even if we change this, there are
> still other response code warts in the NNTP protocol;
[...]
> And short of cleaning
> them all up, halfway efforts aren't really that useful.

Doing them all isn't hard. If I grep for '^  *[1-5][0-9][0-9] ', which
ought to catch all the response codes in the response sections, then
tidy up and sort | uniq, only the following duplicates occur:

200, 201           - greeting and MODE READER have variations in wording
211                - we know about this one
220, 222, 223      - first parameter can be "0" or "n"
221                - as 220 *and* used by HDR with no parameters
411, 412, 420, 430 - minor wording variations
500                - wording variation
502                - used for "service unavailable" and "something broke"

So there are only three nits.

502 = "something broke"; we're already discussing this.
221 with HDR; since we invented this command, let's fix it to be 225.
211 with LISTGROUPS.

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <clive at demon.net>   | Tel:  +44 20 8371 1138
Internet Expert     | Home:  <clive at davros.org>  | Fax:  +44 20 8371 4037
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