[NNTP] LISTGROUP

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Ken Murchison said:
> Forgive my ignorance and/or naivety, but unless the client is actually 
> trying to list articles in a toplevel group (do toplevel groups even 
> contain articles?) wouldn't the group parameter always contain at least 
> one hierarchy separator (".")?

No. Traditionally group names without a dot were local to a site; I believe
that B News and C News automatically excluded them from feeds.

For the record, our current syntax defines a newsgroup name as being a
wildmat item with no wildcards. That is, it is a string of any of the 88
printable ASCII characters except * , ? [ \ and ].

Thus "current group" would be best specified as * or ? (the former is more
consistent with wildmat meaning; the latter is more obvious to humans).

> Alternatively, we can stipulate that the range parameter can only be 
> used if a group is also specified:
> 
> LISTGROUP [group [range]]

I prefer this.

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <clive at demon.net>   | Tel:    +44 20 8495 6138
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