Here are the differences I see between your and my server.
I've included proposed changes, some to yours, some to mine. If
we could get agreed on a standard by this weekend, which may be
ambitious, it would be really good.
BTW, is the stuff I'm ">" including the current version?
> The whole idea is to keep the server as small and (computationally)
> inexpensive as possible. Reading news on our system is not a super
> popular pastime, but a central machine could still get rather heavily
> loaded if 5 people per system were to decide that it was time to catch
> up on the latest happenings.
Agreed. This is, I feel, an implementation detail, although it
should be reflected in the protcol -- i.e., the protocol should
not be bulky or hard to implement. I don't think we suffer from
> No doubt I'll refine it further as I try to interface more client stuff
> to it. Right now it seems to have enough to start making a version of
> 'readnews' work with it.
This is a matter of philosophy: I feel it's very important to make the
server as easy to interface with existing programs as possible, but
still be general enough to provide for future service.
General differences: Let's try to make this as SMTP-like as
possible. One thing I noticed is that you put "."'s in front of
your reply codes. SMTP doesn't do this, and I can't think of
why you do it. Am I missing something?
As far as variable length messages go, there are two possibilities:
The one I am using currently is the
xxx-Start of text, look out /* assumed to be one line */
xxx end of text (no dash)
I don't really like this, since it means we strip off four characters per
line, which slows things down that much.
The second possibility is that we say
xxx-Start of text, look out /* again, a one liner */
xxx End of text /* Maybe we don't need this message */
As usual, any line in the message which starts with a period we
simply duplicate -- that it, we put an extra period in front,
and then the client strips it off. If there is only one period,
> Commands consist of an UPPERCASE command word, some of
> which are followed by parameters. All input is in ASCII,
Very much agreed, especially the CF-LF stuff. It's fairly
trivial to accept lower case, I think you already have hacked
your daemon to do this. But the std should probably call for
> BODY No parameters. Displays the body (text) of the
Same here, except we differ on arguments. All of my commands
like BODY, HEADER, etc. require an article number as an argument.
I think this is better because it's more what readnews/rn will
want: They have an "open article" function, with a numeric
argument. I don't think we need the "next" function, since it
hides the article numbers from the client, and the client, if
it is an existing program, will want to worry about article numbers.
> GET nnn (nnn) is the numeric id of an article in the
> current newsgroup. It must be chosen from the
> range of articles provided when the newsgroup was
This is my "ARTICLE" command.
> GROUP ggg (ggg) is the name of the newsgroup to be selected.
> HEAD No parameters. Displays the header lines of the
Same here, but with parameters.
> LAST No parameters. Backs up to the previous article
> in the current newsgroup. If already positioned
> at the beginning of the newsgroup, an error
No equivalent here. Do we need this? Again, rn/readnews will
take care of this internally.
> NEXT No parameters. Advances to the next article in
> the current newsgroup. If no more articles remain
> in the current group, an error results.
Same comment as for LAST.
> QUIT No parameters. The server process exits and
> closes the connection to the client.
Some commands I didn't see in yours:
ACTIVE - transmit the active file in normal format. By normal,
I mean normal, 4.2 UNIX active file format.
POST - User sends an article, followed by a period on a line
by itself. This is passed to inews, which deals with
it. After inews has dealt with it, daemon returns
NEWSINCE "date" List the new articles, since "date", where
date is a long integer containing the number of seconds
since Jan 1, 1970. Should this be GMT?
BOUNDS - Show high and low message number in current newsgroup.
You provide this with your "GROUP" command, and I should
> Responses are of two kinds. Command/status responses
> are distinguished by having a single period (.) as the first
> character of the line. Text lines have no period, or if the
> text contained a period in the original, that period is dou-
> bled. The intention is that text messages will be displayed
> directly on the user's terminal (or processed through
> 'more'), whereas command/status responses will be inter-
> preted by the client program before any possible display is
As I said above, I move we go to this sort of thing, but
have a single period, so as to be like SMTP. I love conformity.
> Response codes are returned in a command/status return
> line (i.e., they are prefixed with a period). These are
> status reports or command responses from the daemon and
> indicate the response to the last command received from the
You have your status messages much more thought out than I
do, since I sort of assigned them randomly/sequentially.
Also, has it been your experience that only 200/500 series gets used?
> 1xx Informative messages - no significance except to
> humans. Probably these should be displayed to the
> 2xx Last command was ok and is being performed. Mostly
> just indicate that you asked the daemon to do something
> reasonable and it did it.
> 3xx Continue with the command. (used on commands that
> expect to receive more data) You should then send the
> 4xx Couldn't do your last command. Perhaps you simply
> specified a non-existing article or something.
> 5xx Couldn't do your last command. Serious error - the
> command was invalid, or was missing parameters, or the
> daemon program faulted. This means that something was
> wrong enough with your command that current status is
> in doubt. Perhaps one or more pointers has been
> changed. Don't proceed until you have re-established
> the environment (newgroup/article selection). (An
> exception is the "500 bad command" response - your
> entire command was flushed and ignored.)
> The next digit in the code indicates the function response
> x0x Client setup and miscellaneous messages
> x1x Newsgroup selection
> The following response codes are to be expected.
Following SMTP, it should be possible to write a "dumb" client which
doesn't look for a "211", but rather, a "2" in response to a
"GROUP" command, and it knows what order the arguments are in.
> 201 news server closing connection
> (number of articles in group,
> first article number in the group,
> last article number in the group,
> 221 %d %d %d %d %s article retrieved
> first article number in the group,
> last article number in the group,
> unique article id (usually the inode number)
> 354 send article to be posted. End with <CRLF>.<CRLF>
> 413 more than MAXART articles; others suppressed
> 421 No next article in this group
> 422 No previous article in this group
> 422 no such article number in this group
> 521 article file missing
> 522 article file missing - unable to stat
> 550 can't start inews for posting
projects / unix-history / blob