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

[Jeffrey M. Vinocur]

On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:

> Russ Allbery said:
> 
> >> Is this an issue? The current specification - at least as I would read
> >> it - is that LIST ACTIVE, LIST ACTIVE.TIMES, and LIST NEWSGROUPS should
> >> produce the same list of groups given the same wildmat or absence
> >> thereof.
> > I don't think we should indicate that this is the case.  While it might be
> > nice if all servers were configured that way (except for the ACTIVE.TIMES
> > issue above), in practice a lot of servers create groups without adding a
> > description so groups are randomly missing from LIST NEWSGROUPS.
> 
> And again we want to allow that as current practice?  Okay.

Yeah.

In principle, we can't guarantee the lists will appear in sync to the
client even if the server always keeps them all up-to-date (consider the
case where a new group is created after the client does LIST ACTIVE but
before it does LIST NEWSGROUPS).  And besides, if the server doesn't have
useful description text for many groups, why waste the bandwidth having
LIST NEWSGROUPS include them?

 
> Is it reasonable to say that LIST ACTIVE must list all groups? Or is this
> *also* allowed to leave stuff out (apart from for secrecy/authorisation
> reasons)? 

For INN at least, the active file *is* the definitive list of groups 
(filtered by authorization wildmat).


> Should the other two at least be required to be subsets of LIST ACTIVE?

In current practice, the newsgroups file at least doesn't have to be.

-- 
Jeffrey M. Vinocur
jeff at litech.org