[NNTP] Snapshot 5

[Russ Allbery]

Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:

> You don't see the benefit in the example?

>   [C] CAPABILITIES
>   [S] 101 Capability list:
>   [S] VERSION 2
>   [S] READER
>   [S] LIST ACTIVE NEWSGROUPS
>   [S] (test-version-2.1) STREAMING
>   [S] .

> Okay, out it comes.

What bothers me about this example is that the first time I read it, I
thought "oh, that means that the server is sort of supporting the
STREAMING extension but hiding it from any client so that a client won't
try it yet, since it's experimental."  It was only after reading the text
that I realized that it was supposed to be treated as equivalent to
advertising STREAMING, which I found really counter-intuitive.

I just don't think there's enough use in this to have it be worth it.

>> Sections 7.6.2, 8.3.2 and 8.4.2:

>> Should OVERVIEW.FMT and HEADERS really be listed as LIST arguments? 
>> Both of these LIST variants are governed by their own capabilities
>> (OVER and HDR respectively).  Its seems kind of crufty that a single
>> command like LIST HEADERS would have both a separate capability (HDR)
>> and an argument to a second capability (LIST) to advertise it.

> Opinion on this matter seems to be split. It's also why I wanted to
> rename LIST HEADERS as something else.

I'm not sure what to do about this.  We can't rename LIST OVERVIEW.FMT, so
the problem is going to exist no matter what we do.

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