[NNTP] Status and issue resolutions

Ade Lovett ade at lovett.com
Fri May 20 00:49:23 PDT 2005


On May 20, 2005, at 00:36 , Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
> At present, the *intended* differences are:
> * LISTGROUP generates a multiline block after the initial 211 response
>   (nobody was comfortable, way back when, with using a different  
> number);

This is the bit I don't like.

Essentially there are now five different ways for a client to "enter"  
a newsgroup, getting different returned information:

     GROUP foo
     GROUP            (whilst in foo)
     LISTGROUP        (whilst in foo)
     LISTGROUP foo
     LISTGROUP foo low-high

This strikes me as conceptually wrong.  To my mind, done "right", the  
GROUP command would be marked as going-away, with LISTGROUP (perhaps  
even LIST GROUP [<name> [<range>]], though this would require  
extending LIST a little bit more) taking over completely.

There is also the issue now that a client needs to figure out whether  
the "211" returned is now merely a single-line response (from GROUP),  
or the start of a multi-line response (from LISTGROUP).  Such  
overloading feels somewhat unclean.

-aDe




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