[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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