From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 07 2002 - 14:49:29 CDT
Brad Templeton <brad@templetons.com> writes:
> a) Newgroup messages and checkgroup messages are modified to support a
> tag giving full 16 bit character set name for the newsgroup. The name
> is any string. It can include spaces, any printable character except
> comma. (no tabs or newlines) Other details on formation of the names
> are policy matters. A group without a new-name form uses the old name,
> with dots turnd to spaces, first letter capitalized.
Don't use 16-bit characters; that's a horrible idea.
It's not clear to me that you modify the checkgroups message so much as
replace checkgroups with a list of newsgroups and real names, and then use
a separate control message (probably still called checkgroups for
historical compatibility) to distribute newsgroup descriptions. While you
*can* do it all in one control message, I'm not sure it's worth it, since
there's a limit to how much you can play around with the format of the
current checkgroups control message.
At the least, I think you have to introduce a new control message, even if
the new one combines both descriptions and real names.
> d) NNTP is modified to allow the fetch of the new name for any group,
> and to display it in the return after the GROUP command.
I don't see any point in doing this. I suppose it's a minor optimization,
but it also means changing an existing command, and I don't think it's
worth it. LIST NAMES <group> pipelines just fine and can be separately
sent by a client that cares and hasn't already sent a full LIST NAMES
command.
> e) News to Mail gateways are encouraged to add a GroupNames header which
> provides the "readable" group names for people doing mail.
That's a good idea.
> In fact, to implement the above, the only changes to the standard are:
> a) Making sure the control messages have the ability to include the
> new, 16 bit character group names.
> b) Guideline for News to Mail
> The rest can be done and tested and standardized later.
You need something like LIST NAMES to retrieve the real newsgroup names,
and it should support an optional wildmat or group name argument.
I wonder if it would also be useful to have the reverse of that database
available, namely the mapping from real names to the ASCII name. Not
meaningfully different when downloading the whole thing, but it might be
nice to be able to map a given real name to an ASCII name easily and
quickly.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>