From: Brad Templeton (brad@templetons.com)
Date: Mon Oct 07 2002 - 15:07:48 CDT
On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 12:49:29PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 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.
I mean that simply as a proxy for any of the enhanced character sets.
I won't pretend to get into the debate about which charset and which
encoding are best -- however, since this is an entirely new string, there
are no restrictions based on what's hard to do.
>
> *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.
I don't care about this either. New message or expansion of old is fine
with me. It does need to be something authenticated though. I described
early on in this process what I think we actually want, which is a generalized
mechanism to distribute attributes for newsgroups, ranging from names to
descriptions to moderator keys to help files to charters etc.
But since we won't get that standardized I will be happy with a specialized
kludge especially if it contains language that once a generalized method
is standardized that tools be ready to switch to that.
> 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.
We actually wouldn't even specify what NNTP does here, that's for the NNTP
group. All we say is that the news database server SHOULD be able to
provide access to the new names data in a convenient way to the reader.
Let the NNTP group take it from there. I would recommend a way to list
them, a way to fetch them individually. In the long term I again would
recommend the concept of a generalized set of attributes a group can have,
any of which can be fetched by name, so we don't have to change the spec
for every new feature we want to try.
>
> > 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.
That's for the NNTP group.
>
> 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.
Of course this is a good idea, but it is a local protocol, does not need
to be standardized here. Should be standardized in NNTP. For example
if the new name of news.groups is "New Newsgroup Proposals" then it would
be nice if news: URLs could use that name. However, other than that,
I don't see people typing in the new, meaningful names. They would, in 99.9%
of cases, be picking them from menus or finding them with substring
searches.