ietf-nntp POST responses

Charles Lindsey chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk
Mon Dec 31 04:05:36 PST 2001


In <20011229150727.D93705 at demon.net> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:


>Charles Lindsey said:
>> P33. S9.3.1.1 (POST responses)
>> If an article is POSTed, and the server can discover, in real time, that
>> it is syntactically invalid, or breached site policy, or whatever, does it
>> return 441, or do we need to invent a 541 response (there would surely be
>> no point in trying to send it again)?

>I think that we should have separate responses for "known permanent
>failure", "known temporary failure", and "unable to determine how serious
>the failure is". These all need to be 44x errors.

>However, I don't know the best way to get there from here.

Andrew> clients should not be sending the post again, though in fact many of
Andrew> them do (we should include something to discourage clients from doing
Andrew> this). If we were actually going to change existing practice in this
Andrew> area, the thing to do would be to define 441 as a permanent error, and
Andrew> provide a new code (442?) to mean "this post failed for some temporary
Andrew> reason - try it again later", however I am highly dubious about this.

I think that 442 might work. The reasons will be "the transport medium
introduced errors" or, "the server ran out of disk" or suchlike. I would
imagine there are rare events, and that most current 441 responses would
still be 441 responses.

In that case, what would an unmodified client do in the rare cases where
it received an unexpected 442? According to 4.1, it should treat it as a
failure (i.e. it would likely do the same as if it had received 441). IOW,
there is no obvious harm that would arise if we made the change.

Andruk> 441 is all there is at present.  I would be reluctant to change the
Andruk> behavior of such an old command, except in the form of an extension that
Andruk> also required either a parameter to the POST command or some sort of MODE
Andruk> command to enable the extended responses.

No, I think we can risk it without an extension, as explained above.

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