[NNTP] Misc changes

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Mon Apr 11 14:28:46 PDT 2005


Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:

> So can anyone (Russ?) remember what they were and where they got to? My
> memory lists the following, but I don't claim it's complete:

> (1) Placeholder for capability information in responses. I think we
> settled that this can be an extension requested by the client - the only
> thing this loses is the ability to put capability information in the
> initial greeting.

I agree.  I think we aren't going to make any changes in this area.

> (2) Make POST a separate capability. I think this was agreed.

Yes.

> (3) Make LISTGROUP a separate capability. I remember being against this.

> (4) A range facility for LISTGROUP. From memory there was significant
> disagreement as to the semantics.

I'm going to make one more shot at writing up a proposal for how to change
LISTGROUP and see if we can get consensus.  If not, we'll drop it,
although I think we should still seriously consider making LISTGROUP
mandatory.

The other item that was raised was adding a capability for NEWNEWS.  I
agree with the feeling that servers should really provide it, but given
the number that choose not to, maybe we shouldn't be dictating policy in
the standard to quite that degree.  It does have the problem that a
syntactically proper NEWNEWS command can take a huge amount of resources
without any realistic way of reducing those resources:

    NEWNEWS * 19700101 000000 GMT

something that I don't believe is shared by any other mandatory command.
It's not that servers won't implement it at all, but rather that they may
not want to make it available to general (unautheticated, lower-paying,
whatever) clients.

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



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