[ietf-nntp] Draft 21

Clive D.W. Feather clive at demon.net
Wed Feb 18 03:45:48 PST 2004


Ken Murchison said:
> Thanks Clive.  I have a few comments/questions:
> 
> - How should LIST NEWSGROUPS handle a group which has no decsription? 

Omit it.

> The language in the draft leads me to believe that if an empty response 
> is given, that the client might infer that there are no groups 
> available.  Is this correct?

Where do you get that idea? The draft says:

    The list MAY omit newsgroups for which the information is unavailable
    and MAY include groups not available on the server. The client MUST NOT
    assume that the list is complete or that it matches the list returned
    by LIST ACTIVE.


> I assumed that LIST [ACTIVE] is used to 
> get a list of available groups and LIST NEWSGROUPS was just 
> informational (it returns descriptions for those groups that have them). 

Right.

> - How should the HDR ALL capability interact with the new LIST HEADER 
> MSGID?  The reason why I proposed HDR ALL was so that the server didn't 
> have to list every possible header that it can fetch.  Now that we are 
> allowing HDR to return different [sub]sets of header/metadata depending 
> on the form of HDR, the simplicity of HDR ALL has gone away.  For 
> example, how do we handle a server which can return all headers when 
> fetched by msg#, but can only return metadata when fetched by msgid (or 
> vice-versa)?  Using HDR ALL will be misleading, since is only applies to 
> half of the cases.

I tried to word it so that HDR ALL can only be used if it applies to all
cases. However, reviewing what I wrote I see it isn't as clear as it should
be.

I've changed the introduction to the extension to say:

    In the case of headers, an implementation MAY restrict the use of
    this extension to a specific list of headers or MAY allow it to be
    used with any header.  In the latter case it MUST use the argument
    "ALL" following the extension label in the output of LIST EXTENSIONS;
    in the former case (including the situation where the HDR command
    may be used with any header in some circumstances but only with
    specific headers in others) it MUST NOT use any argument.

> Perhaps we should get rid of HDR ALL and replace it 
> with a different response code (214, 216?) for LIST HEADERS which means 
> "all".

The list must carry the special item ":" to mean "all". See the examples
for how this is handled.

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