[NNTP] Misc changes

[Ken Murchison]

Russ Allbery wrote:
> Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:
> 
>>(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.

Here's my $.02:

I think both of these fall into the gray area of trying to document what 
we feel is the proper "core" functionality vs. what is actually done in 
practice.  In both of these cases it think we need to lean towards 
existing deployed behavior.  IMO, both of these changes can be made 
without breaking existing clients.

If virtually all deployed servers provide LISTGROUP then we can/should 
make it mandatory because virtually all clients will depend on it 
anyways (whether its advertised or not).  With respect to LISTGROUP 
<range> functionality, I think an argument can be made either way for a 
separate capability.  Since this is v2 of NNTP we *can* mandate that a 
v2 server provide LISTGROUP <range>.  On the other hand, if providing 
this functionality will be too difficult for some server architectures, 
then we should make it optional.

Regardless of the fact that NEWNEWS has always been mandatory, if a 
large portion of deployed servers/admins disable it, we should make it 
optional and give it its own capability.

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
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