ietf-nntp 9.3.2 still slightly unclear on IHAVE return codes

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Tue Nov 27 15:39:46 PST 2001


Section 9.3.2 currently has:

    If transmission of the article is requested, the client MUST send the
    entire article, including header and body, in the format defined above
    (section 4) for multi-line responses (except that there is no initial
    line containing a response code). Thus a single period (".") on a line
    indicates the end of the text, and lines starting with a period in the
    original text have that period doubled during transmission. The server
    MUST then return a response code indicating success or failure of the
    transferal of the article.

The last sentence is somewhat unclear about return codes, and since IHAVE
has somewhat strange and overlapping return codes (435 is only allowed in
response to the original command, 436 is allowed in response to either the
command or the article, and 437 is only allowed in response to the
article), I think it would be worthwhile to be completely explicit here.

I therefore propose replacing the final sentence of that paragraph with:

    The server MUST return either response code 235, indicating that the
    article was successfully transferred, response code 436, indicating
    that the transfer failed but should be tried again later, or response
    code 437, indicating that the article was rejected.

It partially duplicates information already found in the summary of return
codes, but in this case I think the return codes to IHAVE are confusing
and the additional clarity is helpful.

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



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