[NNTP] Snapshot 6

[Ken Murchison]

Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
> Russ Allbery said:
> 
>>>Since LISTGROUP, OVER and HDR have become optional capabilities rather
>>>than extensions (which I'm fine with), I'd like to see some kind of
>>>uniformity with the way that optional reader commands are advertised. We
>>>have LISTGROUP, OVER and HDR advertised with their own capabilities, yet
>>>POST is an argument to READER.  Obviously OVER needs to be a separate
>>>capability because it has its own argument (unless we tweak syntax), but
>>>LISTGROUP and HDR could simply be additional arguments to READER.
>>
>>>Similarly, if we change the IHAVE capability back to TRANSIT, then the
>>>STREAMING extension could simply be a STREAMING argument to TRANSIT rather
>>>than its own capability.
>>
>>>However, for simplicity and consistency it probably makes more sense to
>>>just make POST its own capability.  Having said all that, I won't argue
>>>strenuously for any changes.
>>
>>Hm, just making POST its own capability is very tempting, I agree.  I like
>>that better than doing what you describe in the first two paragraphs
>>above.  (My general feeling is that arguments to capabilities should be
>>used sparingly and avoided where possible.
> 
> 
> To answer both of you at once, the difference between the approaches is
> that making POST a separate capability allows it to be advertised by a
> transit server, while making POST an argument only allows it to be
> advertised by those servers that fully support the READER group.

Good point.


> On that basis, I'd argue that POST and LISTGROUP should both be arguments
> of READER.

Agreed.


> OVER and HDR should be separate capabilities because they *can*
> be used by message-ID (and note that we still have HEAD in the mandatory
> commands).

Would a transit server really support either of these?


> [If we wanted to make OVER an argument of READER, we can simply say that
> either one argument OVER or two arguments OVER MSGID, in that order,
> appear in the argument list. There's no rule that says that arguments have
> to be independent and reorderable; it's just how things have turned out so
> far.]

True, but having two arguments tied together makes me uncomfortable.  If 
we were to make OVER part of reader, I'd rather see something like OVER 
and OVER-MSGID or OVER-RANGE and OVER-MSGID.


Like I said earlier, I'm not going to make a big stink about this, but I 
think making LISTGROUP an argument to READER and leaving HDR and OVER as 
separate capabilities is a good compromise (for all of the reasons Clive 
mentioned).

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
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