[NNTP] LISTGROUP wording

[Ade Lovett]

Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
> Ken Murchison said:
>>Obviously, I'm not going to speak for Andrew, but I took his comments as 
>>a possible objection to the LISTGROUP initial response line changing 
>>format, not an objection to making LISTGROUP mandatory.
> 
> He pointed out that he wasn't storing the group name anywhere. I assumed
> that made LISTGROUP (no arguments) hard to implement.

Since the client is already painfully aware of which group it's in, why
does the server need to have to remind it?

I really don't see the need for GROUP being allowed to have no arguments
either.  In fact, about the only possible reason I could see it being
(ab?)used for is a client polling to see if high watermarks have
changed, indicating new article arrivals.

On the larger news farms, this is unlikely to have the desired affect,
since groups do not tend to be re-scanned at the whim of a client
(trivial to destroy server performance that way), rather this data will
be updated on a regular basis by a helper and clients will read from
this generated cache.

I'd therefore push for both LISTGROUP and GROUP to have a mandatory
group name argument -- though this is orthogonal to the issue of whether
LISTGROUP should become mandatory -- I humbly suggest that that
particular question should be aimed more a client-side authors than
server-side; actual implementation, as it stands now (and as it would
stand with a required argument) is straightforward enough.

-aDe