Proposal for a standardized LIST DISTRIBUTIONS command

[Julien ÉLIE]

Hi,

In case you have any comments or special need on that command, do not
hesitate to speak up.
Expectations from news readers, how it can be used, implementation
on news servers, etc.

Usage

Syntax
LIST DISTRIBUTIONS

Responses
215 Distributions list follows (multi-line)

Description

See Section 7.6.1 of [RFC3977] for general requirements of the LIST
command.

The distributions list is maintained by some NNTP servers to contain
the name of each distribution that is known by the news server and a
short description about the meaning of the distribution.

The information is returned as a multi-line data block following the
215 response code and contains one line per distribution. Each line
of this list MUST consist of two fields separated from each other by
one or more space or TAB characters (the usual pratice is a single
TAB). The first field is the name of the distribution, and the
second field is a short description of the distribution. There are
no leading or trailing whitespaces in a line. The description MAY
contain whitespaces.

The order of distributions in the list is not significant; the server
need not even consistently return the same order or the same results
if this command is used more than once in a session.

The same distribution SHOULD NOT appear twice in the output of this
command.

The description MUST be in UTF-8.

The distributions list is not newsgroup-based, and an argument MUST
NOT be specified. Otherwise, a 501 response code MUST be returned.

The distributions list MAY be empty. If the server does not maintain
the information, a 503 response code MUST be returned.

The client MAY use this information to provide the user with a list
of known distributions he can use. If the news server implements the
LIST DISTRIBUTIONS command, it SHOULD also implement the LIST
DISTRIB.PATS command and describe in the distributions list at least
all the distributions present in the distrib.pats list so that the
client can use both of these commands jointly. The distrib.pats list
is defined in Section 7.6.5 of [RFC3977]; it assists clients to
choose a value for the content of the Distribution header of a news
article being posted (see Section 3.2.4 of [RFC5536] for the
definition of this header).

Example

Example of a joint use of LIST DISTRIB.PATS and LIST DISTRIBUTIONS:

[C] CAPABILITIES
[S] 101 Capability list:
[S] VERSION 2
[S] READER
[S] LIST ACTIVE DISTRIB.PATS DISTRIBUTIONS NEWSGROUPS
[S] .
[C] LIST DISTRIB.PATS
[S] 215 Information follows
[S] 10:local.*:local
[S] 5:france.*:fr
[S] 20:local.here.*:thissite
[S] .
[C] LIST DISTRIBUTIONS
[S] 215 List of distributions follows
[S] fr Local to France.
[S] local Local to this news server.
[S] thissite Local to this site.
[S] .

ABNF syntax

list-arguments =/ "DISTRIBUTIONS"

list-content =/ list-distributions-content
list-distributions-content =
*(distribution WS distribution-description CRLF)
distribution-description = S-TEXT

--
Julien ï¿œLIE

ￜ Il y a des gens qui parlent jusqu'ￜ ce qu'ils arrivent
ￜ trouver quelque chose ￜ dire. ￜ (Sacha Guitry)