ietf-nntp Response from ARTICLE

[Charles Lindsey]

In <19981005135651.G6897 at demon.net> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:

>>>   4xx - something's broken right now, try again later
>>>   5xx - you might as well give up; some configuration thing would
>>>         have to change or you'd have to use a different parameter
>>>         for this to work

>Charles Lindsey said:
>> Well No! It is the right return for "permission denied because you are
>> unwelcome to speak to this server", but it seems an overkill for
>> "permission denied to read this particular article, but please feel free
>> to ask for other articles (for which permission will likely be granted)".

>I disagree. You will never be able to read *this* article (the one with the
>number or ID requested) without a configuration change at the server. The
>fact that another command beginning ARTICLE might work is irrelevant.

OK, that's a reasonable interpretation to take, but it is not consistent
with other return codes.

>What's the code for "you haven't issued a GROUP yet" ? That ought to be a
>5xx by the above logic. 4xx is reserved for "keep trying and it'll work
>eventually".

The code for "no GROUP selected" is 412, which does not agree with your
interpretation. It is clearly no use repeating the ARTICLE command again
later, because it will still fail. Likewise for "no current article
selected" which returns 420. Both these cases imply a bug in your program.

Again, it the article requested is not found, the code returned is 430,
but retrying later is unlikely to help if the cause was that the article
requested had expired or been cancelled. It would only make sense to retry
in the unliklely case where the article had not arrived yet (in which
case, how had you come to learn of its message-id? - via some URL no
perhaps).

So, whichever interpretation is taken, there seem to be inconsistencies
around. Probably too late to do much about them, however.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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