[NNTP] LISTGROUP

Clive D.W. Feather clive at demon.net
Tue Apr 26 00:09:59 PDT 2005


Russ Allbery said:
>> Can we make the parameter to GROUP be optional?

> This is feeling like we're falling down a slippery slope of last-minute
> changes to me.

Did you look at my actual wording changes to see how it would be done?

> I was willing to pursue LISTGROUP because a few client
> authors went "this, this I want to use" when the idea was raised.  Do we
> have a similar feeling with this addition, or is it just in there for
> cleanliness?  If the latter, I'd rather add it later if a real need shows
> up (something that isn't too difficult to do, since right now this is a
> syntax error).

It's partly there for cleanliness, since LISTGROUP can do it the same way,
but it's partly there for a potential use. I feel it's like the range
stuff: easy to implement and useful if it can be written up simply.
[The range stuff is all new as well, isn't it? Nobody does it already do
they?]

> My intuition says it would be very strange for a client to not know what
> its current group is.

That used to be my intuition on such things, but I discovered what a pain
it can be to track stuff across code broken into modules. As a slightly
contrived example, consider the case where a client has to do an exec() for
some reason.

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