[ietf-nntp] Extension documents

Clive D.W. Feather clive at demon.net
Thu Jun 10 23:54:02 PDT 2004


Russ Allbery said:
>>     If the server provides this extension, it MUST implement all of the
>>     commands in this document except for those marked as optional. If it
>>     does not provide this extension, it MUST NOT implement any of the
>>     commands.
> 
> Do we really need that last sentence?

It comes from section 8.2 of the base document, and has been there for some
while. The thinking was, I believe, to prevent a server implementing
LIST OVERVIEW.FMT without the whole OVER extension.

> I'm thinking of a situation where a
> server author has started an experimental implementation of an extension,
> but it's currently still buggy and probably shouldn't be used by general
> clients.  I can see just not advertising it in LIST EXTENSIONS so that
> clients that do extension discovery won't suddenly start using it, but
> having it there under the standard command name so that people can do
> testing with standard NNTP libraries and tools.

Hmm. That's a good point, but it means we need to revisit the text in 8.2
and decide what our requirements are.

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