ietf-nntp LIST ACTIVE issues

[Russ Allbery]

Charles Lindsey <chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>> 8.6.1.2. Description (LIST ACTIVE)

>>    Other status strings MAY be used.  The definition of these other
>>    values and the circumstances under which they are returned may be
>>    specified in an extension or may be a local extension.  A client
>>    SHOULD treat an unrecognized status string as giving no information on
>>    the status of the group and how posts are handled.

> Yes, that is OK. But the three 'y', 'n' and 'm' should remain as the
> norm, and clients should be able to rely on them when they see them.

Agreed.

> One might go further and suggest that people who provide local
> extensions should at least include 'y', 'n', or 'm' as the first
> character of what they return wherever one of those three reflects the
> actual situation.

I'd support this if we were starting from scratch, but at least INN and I
bet a lot of other news software out there keys on the first character of
the mode and already uses a bunch of modes other than those three, so it
might be fairly hard to retrofit Usenet to follow this model.

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