[NNTP] DATE: reader or general command

[Russ Allbery]

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

>> 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.

> Shall I do it?

It's outside the scope of the revisions that we're supposed to be doing,
kind of, but it's a pretty simple change, so yes, I think so.  I don't see
how it could hurt, and it more closely matches reality.

>> It wasn't provided more as a security thing than anything else,
>> originally,

> Huh?

That was sort of incoherent.  Let me try that again.

I don't want to let my peers read articles off my transit server.  I
wasn't there when the original decision was made to only implement HEAD
and not ARTICLE, but I'll bet that was a consideration.

Yes, the code to support them is almost identical.

I really don't think we should list ARTICLE as a transit command, since
it's pretty much the quintessential example of a reader command.  If
anything, I'd go in the direction of *not* listing HEAD, but really I
don't see any reason to change it.

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