ietf-nntp Response codes - debugging, authentication & unknown

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Lee Kindness said:
> I've collated the comments and redrafted the section:

I'm broadly in agreement with this after the various followup comments.

I have suggested some other wording changes to section 4 in the past,
so I have merged your proposed wording with the other changes and put
the result up as:
    http://www.davros.org/nntp-texts/section-4.txt
Can you live with the results ? It would be nice not to have rival
proposals that need to be merged.


I still have one outstanding problem with the main text:

>        A server MUST respond to a command issued when 
>        the session is in an incorrect state by responding with a 
>        negative status indicator. This may be from either the 4xx or 
>        5xx group as appropriate. 

Is this meant to mean that a server can issue *any* of these two hundred
codes whenever it likes ? Or is it meant to mean that each command
documents specific "incorrect state" responses. Or something else ?

The other thing I note is that a lot of commands have a 502 response
defined as "service unavailable". It seems to me that this actually means
"you are not permitted to execute this command (with these arguments)".
Should that be a general response described in 4.1 (just like 501 for
parsing errors is), rather than with each command ?

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