XGTITLE and XPAT

[Russ Allbery]

Julien ÉLIE <julien at trigofacile.com> writes:

> Hi again,
>
> Should we keep XGTITLE?
> Its 481 response code is bad.  And there is no CAPABILITIES for it.
> Moreover, LIST NEWSGROUPS [wildmat] does the same thing...

I tended against dropping commands that still work.  I don't know if any
reader defaults to using XGTITLE these days (it sticks in my mind that it
was an ANU News thing and maybe tin used it?).  We don't need to advertise
it; new clients should use LIST NEWSGROUPS instead.  It's there for
clients that just try it to see if it works.

> Should we keep XPAT?
> Hmmm...  Why its regexp feature wasn't put into HDR?

It turns out to be surprisingly tricky to document the behavior of XPAT in
a coherent fashion, particularly around its handling of whitespace.  The
IETF NNTP working group tried and decided it wasn't worth the effort.

I don't think we should remove it, but I'm not sure it's ever going to
become official.  It really needs at least an attempt at documentation,
though, so that we can advertise something in CAPABILITIES that has a
specification.  For a private extension like XPAT, we can take shortcuts
that the working group couldn't and just describe INN's behavior.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
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