ietf-nntp Requirement for timeout close unclear

[Russ Allbery]

Section 4 of the current draft has the following text:

    An NNTP server MAY have an inactivity autologout timer. Such a timer
    MUST be of at least three minutes duration.  The receipt of any
    command from the client during that interval SHOULD suffice to reset
    the autologout timer.  When the timer expires, the server should close
    the TCP connection without sending any response to the client.

In that final sentence, should that "should" be a "SHOULD"?  If not, could
the wording be changed to something like "it is recommended that the
server close..." or the like to make it clearer that it's not a protocol
requirement?

I reviewed the previous list discussion of this section of the draft as
best I could without re-reading the entire archives, and while there's one
comment from Thomas Gschwind <tom at infosys.tuwien.ac.at> in 1998 on this
area, I don't see any additional discussion.  It's not clear to me why
there's a requirement that the server not send any response to the client;
INN's nnrpd has been sending such a response since version 1.0 and I'm not
aware of any problems that it causes.  (Note that innd does not send a
final response, but instead just closes the connection.)

RFC 977 makes no mention of the word "timeout," so my assumption is that
this was added in the new draft.

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