[NNTP] LIST EXTENSIONS (again)

Clive D.W. Feather clive at demon.net
Tue Nov 9 21:33:47 PST 2004


Jeffrey M. Vinocur said:
>> Right. Except that it would be "_NNTP_ 2 3".
> Is everyone in agreement that we need the special underscores here?  It 
> strikes me as a strange and unnecessary distinction, or perhaps I just 
> haven't thought about it hard enough.

The reason for the underscores is precisely because it *isn't* an
extension. We agreed a namespace for extension labels (alphanumeric plus
dot and dash), and that namespace ought to be used only for that purpose.
However we do it, lines in the LIST EXTENSIONS output that are not related
to real live extensions ought not to use that namespace.

[Put another way, it's better to say 'an extension label is a keyword' than
'an extension label is a keyword other than "NNTPV" followed by one or more
digits'.]

It costs nothing in the text, it costs nothing for in software (which won't
care), and it eliminates a possible future problem (C and POSIX have had
*endless* aggro because of namespace troubles).

> On a related note, I don't think we need to cram everything under 
> discussion this week into a single line of LIST EXTENSIONS; if we want 
> to indicate specification revision and command sets available, can't we 
> just make them two separate lines?

I want to think on this some more.

> (Oh, and would VERSION be a better name?)

If it's a separate line, then "_VERSION" is fine by me.

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