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

[Charles Lindsey]

In <Pine.LNX.4.44.0303250906520.7482-100000 at puck.litech.org> "Jeffrey M. Vinocur" <jeff at litech.org> writes:

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

>> 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)? 

I think our draft should imply that is so.

However, an individual server might decide that certain groups (e.g.
those in Usenet-2) should not be listed to clients with insufficient
authorization. I think such a server should just be left to get on with
that, with no help or hindrance from our document.

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

So for most servers, I imagine.

>> 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.

My newsgroups file is actually bigger than my active file (CNews updates
it automatically from a checgroups message, before asking whether you want
to add the missing groups - I actually find that convenient for knowing
what groups are out there).

But I would certainly expect the newsgroups file to be a superset of the
active file, even if there were no descriptions for some groups in it.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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