[NNTP] LISTGROUP

[Russ Allbery]

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

>> First, the command is pretty widely implemented, and it's not obvious
>> anything useful is gained by making it optional.  If we're going to
>> make NEWNEWS mandatory,

> EXCUSE ME!

> NEWNEWS has always been mandatory. RFC 977 section 3 paragraph 3:

>     Every command described in this section must be implemented by all
>     NNTP servers.

Yes, but as we're all painfully aware, the connection between RFC 977 and
reality is tenuous at best.

>> LISTGROUP is a lot easier to implement and more widely supported right
>> now, and that would get rid of one of our capabilities that we have to
>> keep track of.

> I don't have a significant problem with doing this. Is it a significant
> load on servers?

For INN, it's a traversal of the overview records for the group, so there
is some load but it's not anything I'd worry tremendously about.  For
older servers, it's basically a readdir plus a sort.  I would expect that
most current servers will do something vaguely equivalent to traversing
the group overview database.

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