[NNTP] [2505] CAPABILITIES indication of features not currentlyavailable

Clive D.W. Feather clive at demon.net
Fri Dec 3 06:34:32 PST 2004


Ruud H.G. van Tol said:
>> we're trying to get *away* from the suck-it-and-see school of protocol
>> design. So I would suggest that the SASL capability should indicate
>> what will be available once a privacy layer is in place. This could
>> be via specific flags:
> 
> Is it also useful to indicate what is *not* available?
> 
> I first read your '-PLAIN' as 'minus PLAIN', meaning 'PLAIN is not
> supported'.

Hmm.

I have no problem with designing a mechanism that allows a server to
distinguish all three; so:

    SASL CRAM-MD5
    -483 SASL PLAIN
    -- SASL GSSAPI

would mean:

    "I do CRAM-MD5, I'll do PLAIN once privacy is in place, but I'll never
    do GSSAPI".

Whether there's enough demand that server authors would actually do it is
another question.

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <clive at demon.net>   | Tel:    +44 20 8495 6138
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