[NNTP] Snapshot

[Russ Allbery]

Ken Murchison <ken at oceana.com> writes:

> C, 215:  you show "LIST" as a valid command.  Unless I missed it, we no
> longer document "LIST" as a shortcut to "LIST ACTIVE *".  Are you using
> this as a way to capture the extensions to LIST?  In that case maybe it
> would make more sense to just have "LIST" and nothing else, since this
> will include "LIST ACTIVE", "LIST HEADERS", etc.

LIST was the original command.  In an ill-advised move in retrospect
(hindsight is 20-20 and all), when additional types of information were
added, they were bolded on to LIST and LIST started behaving differently
based on its second argument.  This was possible since the original LIST
command didn't take any arguments and just returned the whole newsgroup
list.  See RFC 977, which documents the original LIST command.

Since all servers support LIST with no arguments and since RFC 977 defines
it, we need to continue to allow for it, as odd as it is now that we have
other types of LIST commands.

The original LIST description in RFC 977 is a fascinating read,
particularly the discussion of newsgroup flags, and a pretty clear example
of why RFC 977 is hopelessly obsolete for writing real NNTP clients.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>