[NNTP] [2505] CAPABILITIES indication of features not currently available

[Russ Allbery]

Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:
> Russ Allbery said:

>> This is a pure complexity versus expressiveness tradeoff.  I'm again
>> inclined to go for less complexity and less expressiveness because
>> other protocols do not have this and have not apparently needed it.  I
>> can see the cases where this might be helpful, but in practice I just
>> don't think they're going to be all that useful or important.

> Can I start by noting that, under my proposal, the minimal requirements
> are:
> * Servers need to do nothing.
> * Clients need to be prepared to ignore lines beginning with "-".
> That's a pretty low barrier and, in the case of clients, it's likely to be
> what they're doing anyway (rather than panicking when they see such a
> line). But, in exchange, we get the framework for future facilities if we
> need them. Again, let me ask you see my response to Ken's response, which
> I'm about to write.

It's not implementation complexity that I'm worrying about so much as
complexity of the standard itself.  It's not that the software has to
understand all of that; it's that an implementor has to read it all and
understand it and figure out when to use it and how to use it properly.

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