[NNTP] LISTGROUP

[Russ Allbery]

Charles Lindsey <chl at clerew.man.ac.uk> writes:

> But it would make more practical sense for it to be the first article in
> the range. Surely this is easily arranged, given the need to do some
> implementation work for this anyway.

The worry that I have about doing this is that it makes it look like the
current article pointer should also stop at the end of the range, and
*that* is both unusual and possibly a pain to implement given that it's a
concept not previously found in the protocol.  Saying that it will be set
to the beginning of the range but won't stop at the end of the range is
awkward to explain.

It also requires some distinguished value for the article pointer that
means it's invalid even if there are articles in the group, something that
may not already be available, but that's probably a lesser problem.

I'm not particularly enamored of this idea.  Very little uses the current
article pointer in practice these days, and this adds some complexity to
the description without a lot of benefit.

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