Custom Query (44 matches)

RFC 3977, section 3.2:

Response codes not specified in this standard MAY be used for any installation-specific additional commands also not specified. These SHOULD be chosen to fit the pattern of x9x specified above.

INN uses quite a few response codes that do not fit this pattern for various extensions. XBATCH and XGTITLE should have used response codes in the x9x range.

Impact: Additional ambiguity over the meaning of reply codes, as those reply codes could later be standardized as the reply codes for other commands.

For XGTITLE and probably XBATCH, there is no way to fix this now. Changing the reply codes would break all existing implementations.

According to control.ctl man page:

The third argument for a line affecting checkgroups does not affect whether the line matches. It is only used after a matching line is found, to filter out which newsgroups listed in the checkgroups will be processed. This means that a line like:

checkgroups:*:*binaries*:drop

will cause all checkgroups control messages to be dropped unless they match a line after this one in control.ctl, not just ignore newsgroups containing binaries in the name. The general rule is to never use * in the second field for a line matching checkgroups messages. There is unfortunately no way to do what the author of a line like the above probably intended to do (yet).

LIST OVERVIEW.FMT is wrong if the news administrator changes the result of his overview without rebuilding it (old articles will have bad overview information and RFC 3977 states it "MUST NOT include fields for which the database is inconsistent"). A finer control on it should be added in inn.conf.

Russ Allbery suggests the following thing:

"overview.fmt for one shouldn't be a separate configuration file. I'd been planning, but never got around to, making it instead a list parameter in inn.conf using the new configuration syntax; in other words, something like:

extraoverview: [ xref, newsgroups ]

(note the absence of the mandatory fields; there's no reason to make people list them in the configuration).

If we had two configuration parameters, one that lists the fields saved to overview and the other listing what to advertise, a news administrator could do the right thing.

It's a lot harder to figure this out automatically inside INN. You could assume that any changes to the list of extra fields aren't consistent until all of overview has been rebuilt, I suppose...."