[NNTP] Snapshot 6

[Russ Allbery]

Ken Murchison <ken at oceana.com> writes:

> We already do, its the OVER capability.  OVER mandates that LIST
> OVERVIEW.FMT is available, the separate LIST OVERVIEW.FMT capability is
> redundant and potentially confusing.

> I really don't see why its useful.  I assume that a client would only
> use LIST OVERVIEW.FMT if it intends to use OVER.

Well, in the case of LIST OVERVIEW.FMT, the client may be intending to use
XOVER, as Charles points out.  That being said, it's hard to construct an
example of where that would imply that advertising LIST OVERVIEW.FMT but
not OVER would be something a server would do.

> If a LIST variant is useful by itself, then I can see why we would
> advertise it separately, but if it is implicitly tied to other
> functionality which has its own capability, then its makes no sense to
> me whatsoever.  In my experience, allowing for ambiguity in a protocol
> is a *bad* thing.

The problem is that we have two different things with which we can be
consistent:  we can make a simple rule across the board that all list
varients are advertised via the LIST capability, or we can have one
capability per linked set of commands.  Either way we go, we break the
other consistency principle.

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