ietf-nntp IETF 41 summary -- Comments Welcome

Nat Ballou (Exchange) natba at Exchange.Microsoft.com
Mon May 4 17:41:21 PDT 1998


>From the summary I wrote:
> During the discussion about the "rfc977bis" draft, there was a
> lengthy discussion about excluding the AUTHINFO command from this
> document and doing it in a separate extensions document. This was
> proposed as a tactical move to help get the "rfc977bis" document
> wrapped up and publishable. There was some concern there would be
> problems with this since it would mean that the base protocol would
> not include any form of authentication/identification command.
> However, other folks noted that the original NNTP spec didn't have
> this and most folks don't depend on these features. So, AUTHINFO
> will be removed from this draft and put into an extensions document
> of its own. There was a volunteer to create this new document.
> Unfortunately, I didn't capture the name of that individual.

Basically, I think this is a bad idea.  Numerous server and client 
implementations already support an AUTHINFO command.  Even if you 
made it an extension, server implementations would have to go on
supporting it as a default command, since there are clients out there
today that do not support the extension negotiation - and probably 
behave incorrectly when the command is not present.  So, making it
an extension has very little value.  As a matter of fact, it would
be preferable if any changes to the AUTHINFO command be done in a way 
that does not arbitrarily break existing clients.

Nat

P.S. - I did not volunteer to write this draft.



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