News Article Format
                        draft-ietf-usefor-article-02
                            USEFOR Working Group

6.6.3.1 Single group

6.6.3.1 Single group
         The "mvgroup" control message requests the first specified
         group to be moved to the second group. The message contains a
         "multipart/news-groupinfo" (section 6.6.1.2) body part containing
         machine- and human-readable information about the new group.

         When this message is received, the new group SHOULD be created
         and all articles, including named articles, SHOULD be copied or
         moved to the new group, then the old, now empty group SHOULD be
         deleted.

         NOTE: For servers that use a file system directory structure to
         organize message storage, this operation is quite efficiently
         implemented as a single directory rename operation.

         If the old group does not exist, the message is ignored unless
         the new group does not exist either, in which case the new
         group is created just as for a "newgroup" message.

         An indication that the old group was replaced by the new group
         MAY be left back in the server's configuration and be made
         available to clients.

         NOTE: For servers that use an "active" file this means an entry
         in the form "oldgroup xxx yyy =newgroup" is created.

         NOTE: If the old group did not exist, this is considered a
         local configuration error. Therefore it is the best to correct
         this error when a mvgroup is received.

         If the old group does not exist, the message is ignored unless
         the new group does not exist either, in which case the new
         group is created just as for a "newgroup" message.

         If both groups exist, the groups MAY be "merged". If this is
         done, it MUST be done correctly, i.e. implementations MUST take
         care that the messages in the group being deleted are
         renumbered accordingly to avoid overwriting articles in one
         group with those of the other and that crossposted articles
         don't appear twice. Otherwise, the old group is just deleted.

         In all cases, information transported in the
         "multipart/news-groupinfo" body part is applied to the new group.

         Named articles are taken from the mvgroup message, the new
         group (if already existent) and the old group in this
         precedence.

         As a special case, the second name, i.e. the one of the new
         group MAY be omitted. In this case, only the information of the
         group is updated according to the contained
         "multipart/news-groupinfo".

	 Until most relay agents conform to this document, whenever a mvgroup
       control message for a single group is issued, a corresponding pair of
       rmgroup and newgroup control messages SHOULD be issued a few days later.