[NNTP] DATE: reader or general command

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Thu Dec 2 01:08:09 PST 2004


Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:

> No, it's listed as a reader command because that's what the previous
> drafts have said:

>     MODE READER SHOULD be sent by any client that intends to use
>     any command in this specification (including extensions)
>     other than IHAVE, HEAD, STAT, LIST ACTIVE, or LIST EXTENSIONS;

> except that I added QUIT for obvious reasons.

> I'm happy to shift commands between the various classes based on the
> consensus of the working group. Personally I'd move DATE, HELP, and
> NEWNEWS to general,

innd is definitely not going to provide NEWNEWS.  NEWNEWS requires a
completely different type of database to work efficiently than innd would
otherwise need.

A case could be made for HELP, which is widely implemented in transit-only
servers.  I'd be mildly inclined to move HELP to general, yes.

> and I don't see the logic that says HEAD is general but ARTICLE
> isn't.

Because you can't actually read news with HEAD, just debug problems, and
you don't get more information from ARTICLE that's useful for debugging
problems.  It wasn't provided more as a security thing than anything else,
originally, but I think the reasoning is sound.

> But I'm leaving it up to those who write split-function servers to
> decide.

I'd just stick with what INN has always done; there isn't anything
fundamentally broken about how the division was done, and there's no real
point in worrying about it.

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



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