Re: [leafnode-list] New Work In Progress Snapshot of 2.0b8_ma series

[krasel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Cornelius Krasel)]

Matthias Andree wrote:

[XGTITLE support in fetchnews]

At the moment, it works like this:

1) If a new newsgroup is encountered, fetchnews sends "XGTITLE newsgroup"

2) If the answer is the name and description of the newsgroup, it's fine.
   Most servers will, however, return something like "command not under-
   stood".

3) In this case, fetchnews sends "LIST NEWSGROUPS newsgroup".

4) The server will reply with either
   - the name and description of the newsgroup (what we hope to get)
   - a list of all newsgroups names and descriptions (which we don't want)
   - "command not understood"

Matthias proposes to skip steps 1) and 2) because most servers don't
understand XGTITLE anyway. I have, however, come across some server
software (unfortunately I don't remember which one) which understands
XGTITLE. I do not know whether this software is able to parse
"LIST NEWSGROUPS" correctly, and - since I have forgotten which server
software it was - I cannot test it. If we could positively say that
there is no server software still in use which uses XGTITLE and cannot
parse LIST NEWSGROUPS, I would be all for dropping XGTITLE. Since we
cannot say that, I prefer to err on the side of caution, even if this
causes a little bit more NNTP traffic (and complicates the code).

--Cornelius.

-- 
/* Cornelius Krasel, U Wuerzburg, Dept. of Pharmacology, Versbacher Str. 9 */
/* D-97078 Wuerzburg, Germany   email: krasel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx */
/* "Science is the game we play with God to find out what His rules are."  */

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