ietf-nntp draft-ietf-nntpext-base-17

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Jeffrey M. Vinocur said:
>>>>> (1) Is NEWGROUPS supposed to be consistent with LIST ACTIVE.TIMES? Is
>>>>> this a SHOULD or a MUST sort of thing?
[...]
> True.  But, consider the following scenario...
> 
> A server has all of the creation dates available for the past decade.  
> Everyone is happy if NEWGROUPS returns all the groups since any date, no 
> matter how old.  But to avoid wasting bandwidth, the admin would like LIST 
> ACTIVE.TIMES to only return groups created in the past year.

A good point (as are others made in this sub-thread).

New text for NEWGROUPS:

   This command returns a list of newsgroups created on the server
   since the specified date and time.  The results are in the same
   format as the LIST ACTIVE command (see section #.#).  However, they
   MAY include groups not available on the server (and so not returned
   by LIST ACTIVE) and MAY omit groups for which the creation date is
   not available.  The results SHOULD be consistent with those of the
   LIST ACTIVE.TIMES command, except that if the specified date and
   time is earlier than the oldest entry in the latter then the results
   of this command may include extra groups.

and for LIST ACTIVE.TIMES:

   The file MAY omit newsgroups for which the information is unavailable
   and MAY include groups not available on the server; in particular,
   the file MAY omit all groups created before the date and time of
   the oldest entry.  The client MUST NOT assume that the list is
   complete or that it matches the list returned by LIST ACTIVE.  The
   NEWGROUPS command may provide a better way to access this information
   and the results of the two commands SHOULD be consistent (subject
   to the caveats in the description of that command).

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <clive at demon.net>   | Tel:    +44 20 8495 6138
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