ISSUE: 4.3 contradicts 5.2.3

[Russ Allbery <rra@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I was reading over the current draft as part of a recent discussion on
news.admin.hierarchies and noticed that 4.3 contains the statement:

  One application/news-checkgroups message may contain information for one
  or more hierarchies and is considered complete for any hierarchy for
  which it contains a <valid-group>. In other words, an
  application/news-checkgroups body part consisting of:

      example.moderated         A moderated newsgroup (Moderated)
      example.test              An unmoderated test group

  is a statement that the example.* hierarchy contains two newsgroups,
  example.moderated and example.test, and no others. This media type
  therefore MUST NOT be used for conveying partial information about a
  hierarchy; if a group from a given hierarchy is present, all groups that
  exist in that hierarchy MUST be listed.

However, this is not true in the presence of chkscope in 5.2.3:

  A checkgroups message is interpreted as an exhaustive list of the valid
  groups in all hierarchies or sub-hierarchies with a prefix listed in the
  <chkscope> argument, excluding any sub-hierarchy where the <chkscope>
  argument is prefixed by "!". If no <chkscope> argument is given, it
  applies to all hierarchies for which group statements appear in the body
  of the message. Since much existing software does not honor the
  <chkscope> argument, the body of the checkgroups control message MUST
  NOT contain group statements for newsgroups outside the intended scope
  and SHOULD contain a correct newsgroup list even for sub-hierarchies
  excluded with "!" <chkscope> terms. News servers, however, MUST honor
  <chkscope> as specified here.

I think the fix would be to change to something like this:

  ...and is considered complete for any hierarchy for which it contains
  a <valid-group> unless accompanied by external information limiting
  its scope (such as a <chkscope> parameter to a checkgroups control
  message as described in Section 5.2.3)

and at the end, add:

  ...MUST be listed unless its scope is limited by external information.

but I'm not horribly happy with that.  It feels awkward.  I suppose the
other way of going about it is to redefine hierarchy, but I think that
would be tricky to do.

(I've seen the other messages to the group over the past week and will
reply.  I'm still on vacation for a couple more days.  I just wanted to
send this out before I forgot about it.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@xxxxxxxxxxxx)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>