News submodule roadmap

It's the new year! As the owner of the NNTP submodule of Mozilla Mailnews, let me lay out a rough roadmap on what I seek to get done on the submodule for some time to come.

For Thunderbird 3 (and SeaMonkey 2.0, of course), the ability to filter on any header is probably in and of itself sufficient to make people happy. The only other change I think reasonable to make it into 3.0 is making get messages actually get messages. More substantive changes will have to wait for later.

For 3.next, I think the most important thing to tackle is news URIs, as they are incredibly broken for most practical purposes. High importance is ensuring that news://<server>/message-id and news://<server>/group are usable via external protocol handlers and command line. Making server-less URIs work would also be delightful.

Also important to me is more protocol support: AUTHINFO SASL, STARTTLS, and CAPABILITIES in roughly that order. While I'm at it, I'll also clean up some of the cruft surrounding nsNNTPProtocol. I would also like to have a lot more comprehensive tests for 3.next.

What's not on my plate is more binaries support. Specifically, I'll not be working on combine-and-decode (as useful as it is in general). Offline love I think will have to wait for 3.next.next before I can find some time to work on it.

Finally, I'd like to get all of the news bugs neatly triaged into categories. As of me writing this message, I count some 150 bugs in the Networking: News component, and I'm sure there are a few more bugs floating around in other components that I haven't found. I'd like to remove dupes and categorize all of these into specific categories (at least locally). And, more importantly, remove the cruft of these bugs. Many of the NEW bugs should be UNCO because no one ever really confirmed them.