[NNTP] LISTGROUP plus a fix for range descriptions

[Mark Crispin]

On Mon, 18 Apr 2005, Russ Allbery wrote:
> No, I'm allowing articles to be withdrawn, which is the entire reason why
> this is an estimate and not an exact number.

That isn't what I've seen.  I've seen "estimates" that bear no 
relationship to the number of articles at any time.

> In practice, the estimate never errs on the low side, but does err on the
> high side occasionally because it may or may not take into account all
> cancels that have occurred in the group.

I'm not sure, but I think that I have seen low-side estimates.  After some 
number of iterations, I ended up completely ignoring that value as being 
worse than useless.

> So your feeling is that the statement:
>   In all other aspects the LISTGROUP command behaves identically to the
>   GROUP command.
> is not adequate?  How does that fall short?  I'm happy to change the
> wording to be more explicit; it is definitely my intention to defer to the
> GROUP specification for all of these issues.

Something like "The LISTGROUP command responds with the same 211 response 
as a GROUP command (see section 6.1.1.2), and in addition returns..."

The fact that you describe this response separately for LISTGROUP implies 
that the semantics of the response are different.  You may feel that is 
silly (and it is), but 5 years from now some twit will argue that unless 
explicitly prohibited.

We're talking sad experience here.  I have wasted many hours of my life 
arguing such things with twits, and not even archives from the WG mailing 
list were enough to dissuade the twit from insisting that the RFC "really 
means" what he says it means.

>   o  an article number followed by a dash followed by another article
>      number
> to describe ranges.  I propose adding the following sentence after this
> wording everywhere it occurs in our draft:
>   Any range specified as n-m where m is less than n is defined to be
>   equivalent to the range n-.

That's OK with me.

Alternatively, you could do:
    o  an article number followed by a dash followed by another, higher,
       article number

By the way, be careful about using the term "range".  I once wasted a long 
time arguing with a twit who insisted that IMAP ranges had the semantics 
of mathematical ranges (that is, 5:2 is the empty set) even though there 
was explicit text to the contrary, all because the word "range" was used.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.