[NNTP] LISTGROUP wording

[Clive D.W. Feather]

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

Because it isn't always "painfully aware".

It's a programming philosophy thing that I've run into in several places
in the past. While it seems "obvious" that the client should be aware,
it sometimes turns out to be harder than it looks, requiring the
maintenance of global state across several modules.

It's hard to come up with short, snappy, examples because it's the sort of
problem that only emerges in large complicated systems.

The other piece of state associated with a connection - the current article
number - can be determined by just going "STAT".

> 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.

Those are orthogonal: allowing GROUP or LISTGROUP without the group name is
*only* beneficial to obtain the group name. You can do that polling with
GROUP already.

> 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 --

Hmm.

> I humbly suggest that that
> particular question should be aimed more a client-side authors than
> server-side;

I agree with this last bit: we need to hear from the potential
beneficiaries.

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