[NNTP] LIST EXTENSIONS (again)

[Ken Murchison]

Russ Allbery wrote:

> Howard Swinehart <binaryboy at binaryboy.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>The difference is that a client author can potentially experiment and
>>create a workaround for non-compliant servers that exist today while the
>>future protocol is completely unknown.  A client might want to give up
>>immediately when it sees a backwards incompatible version number.
> 
> 
> Well, I'm dubious that anyone would want to produce a version of NNTP that
> was that completely incompatible so that the same sort of fallback that
> you'd use for Netscape Collabra wouldn't also work.
> 
> I'm not completely opposed to the idea, but I'm very suspicious of it
> because other protocols haven't needed it.  If I had my druthers, we'd
> just copy IMAP and not worry too much about it.


Right.  I'm old, but not old enough to have taken part in the IMAP 
discussions, but my guess is that all of these arguments have been made 
before and have ended up being inconsequential, otherwise we'd see such 
version info in IMAP or POP or SMTP.

I've finally come to realize that NNTP is different from a sheer 
load/bandwidth standpoint, but from a protocol standpoint, its really no 
different from the other messaging protocols (other than the fact that 
transport and retrieval have been intermingled, which is really poor 
design).

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
--PGP Public Key--    http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp