[ietf-nntp] Draft 21

Ken Murchison ken at oceana.com
Wed Feb 18 06:03:36 PST 2004


Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
> Ken Murchison said:
> 
>>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 understand what this passage says, and I have coded it as such, but 
the last sentence in 7.6.5.2 can be somewhat misleading:

"Note that an empty list is a possible valid response (whether or not a 
wildmat is specified) and indicates that there are no such groups."

Perhaps this should say: "... indicates that there are no groups 
matching the selection criteria which have descriptions."

>>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.

Sorry, I missed that.  Do we really want two ways to say the same thing 
(HDR ALL and ":"), ":" seems sufficient.  But I'm not going to argue.

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
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