[NNTP] LIST EXTENSIONS and an NNTPv2 capability

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Wed Oct 13 10:32:11 PDT 2004


Ken Murchison <ken at oceana.com> writes:
> Russ Allbery wrote:

>> The proposed solution is this:  Specify in our base draft that any
>> server that fully complies with the new specification advertise the
>> NNTPv2 capability as part of LIST EXTENSIONS.  Clients can then ignore
>> or treat with dubiousness any server that doesn't advertise that
>> capability, thus solving the Collabra problem.

> I'd submit that LIST EXTENSIONS is no longer an optional command for the
> server.  Any server compliant with with RFC 977bis MUST implement LIST
> EXTENSIONS and MUST advertise at least the NNTPv2 capability, even if no
> extensions are implemented.  This serves to tell the client that
> previously optional/non-standard commands that we have standardized as
> part of the base specification (e.g. DATE) are supported.

Oh, yeah, I forgot that.  Yes, LIST EXTENSIONS would also become a
mandatory command.

> As far as the legacy extensions which we are standardizing, we need to
> document somewhere that any server which supports one or more of these
> extensions and is upgraded to be compliant with RFC 977bis MUST also be
> upgraded to be compliant with the standardized versions of these
> extensions (including advertising it where appropriate).  This is the
> only way that I can see that a client which sees NNTPv2 advertised will
> know if these extensions are supported and how they will behave.

Yup.  That makes sense.

> Unfortunately, I don't know where this should be documented.  I don't
> think we can put it in the base doc since we don't want the base doc
> referencing extension docs.  Putting it in the extensions docs doesn't
> really help because a server author may fail to reference them when
> upgrading to RFC 977bis compliance.  Perhaps the best thing would be to
> have a companion (Informational) document to RFC 977bis discussing
> compatibility/upgrade issues.

This was exactly the same problem that I had, but I really don't want to
create a completely separate document; that will set us back a while.
Referencing the extensions in the base document may be the best option
right now, given the upgrade situation that we're running into.

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



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