[ietf-nntp] Draft 21

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Ken Murchison said:
> 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."

That's what "such groups" means, but I'll clarify a bit:

    ... no groups meeting the above criteria.

both here and LIST ACTIVE.TIMES.

>>>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.

The idea was that HDR ALL means "you don't need to bother with LIST
HEADERS if you only want headers, not metadata"; both it and the latter
command are optimisations when dealing with headers.

I would say that:
* EITHER we leave it as is (simple),
* OR we be completely symmetrical, and modify LIST HEADERS to be:
    LIST HEADERS MSGID        list headers available with message-id
    LIST HEADERS ARTNO        list headers available with number/no argument
    LIST HEADERS              list headers available in both ways
and make the LIST EXTENSIONS results be:
    HDR ALL                   LIST HEADERS returns ":"
    HDR ALLMSGID              LIST HEADERS MSGID returns ":", ARTNO doesn't
    HDR ALLARTNO              LIST HEADERS ARTNO returns ":", MSGID doesn't
    HDR                       No form of LIST HEADERS returns ":"

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Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <clive at demon.net>   | Tel:    +44 20 8495 6138
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