ietf-nntp Re: Last major open issue (48x return codes)

Charles Lindsey chl at clerew.man.ac.uk
Mon Sep 15 09:31:13 PDT 2003


In <20030910110133.GV27212 at finch-staff-1.thus.net> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:

>Russ Allbery said:
>>> My (clueless?) guess is that existing clients can derive meaning from 48x,
>>> but wouldn't have any idea what the problem is if it sees 401.
>> Yeah, I would expect that to result in termination of the connection for a
>> lot of clients since it got back an unrecognized response code.

>Why termination? From ARTICLE, perhaps. But not from (say) OVER.

Gererally speaking, 4xx means "this does not work at the moment; it might
work if you try later on, or it might work if you jump through the proper
hoop first". It is always reaonable to continue by giving up on that
attempt and resorting to Plan B (which might be to workaround without
using that command, or to proceed to next business).

Now if assorted 4xy responses currently do things for various 'x' (mostly
with the meaning "try again later"), then it is perfectly reasonably for
the base document to define a subclass 48y for the "you need to jump
through a hoop" cases. Then we can define 480 for "authentication needed"
and "483" (or maybe 481) for "privacy needed" (or is it the other way
around), and leave the rest for future enhancements. I don't really like
the idea of using a command name as part of the following text. That text
is for humans, and it really indicates that you need to configure your
reader differently.

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