[NNTP] Snapshot 6

[Russ Allbery]

Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:
> Russ Allbery said:

>> If this line isn't there and the server just says:
>> 
>>     AUTHINFO SASL
>>     READER LISTGROUP
>> 
>> then the client doesn't know for certain that authentication *won't*
>> help, since the server may just not be using modifiers.

> True. Which means the client has to fall back to "suck it and see"; the
> whole point of capabilities was to get rid of that, surely?

My point is that you can't get rid of it completely, so I'm not sure how
much getting rid of it in a few more cases really helps.  You still don't
know whether you can post after authentication; you just know that you
*might* be able to.  How many cases are there where you can't actually
post even after authentication but authentication is listed as a
capability?  In my experience, that's an extremely unusual configuration.

I'm weighing that against the additional complexity, with questions like
what it means when you're listing the same capability multiple times with
different modifiers and the like.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>