[NNTP] [2508] LIST capability handling

Ken Murchison ken at oceana.com
Tue Nov 30 07:00:51 PST 2004


Clive D.W. Feather wrote:

> I think you've misunderstood my point.
> 
> ACTIVE.TIMES, if provided, always accepts a wildmat. DISTRIB.PATS, again if
> provided, never does. However, there's an arbitrary number of further
> keywords that servers could provide, not documented in this specification.
> For any given keyword, does it accept a wildmat or not? Does LIST XTRA.DATA?
> What about LIST PRIVATE.GROUPS? Or LIST CHARGED.GROUPS?
> 
> Obviously, there's no way for this to be specified ahead of time. So do we
> make clients suck it and see, or do we provide the information in the
> CAPABILITIES output?

Yuck.  If a client chooses to use a private extension, it better damn 
well know what the syntax is ahead of time (preferably because its 
documented somewhere).  I don't think we want to get into specifying 
syntax via protocol, just what options are available.  IMO, this is a 
solution looking for a problem.

-- 
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



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