[ietf-nntp] AUTHINFO draft 01

[Russ Allbery]

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

> I've finally got round to reading this. I think it's mostly fine, but
> have a few points.

> 2.1.2 last para: if you change the syntax to
>     AUTHINFO USER username...
>     AUTHINFO PASS password...

> then the white-space problem mostly goes away, because:

>     AUTHINFO USER fred flintstone
>     AUTHINFO PASS very secret

> becomes legal.

The only worry here is that many servers split on whitespace before doing
anything else, and then wouldn't be able to distinguish between:

    AUTHINFO USER fred flintstone
    AUTHINFO USER fred  flintstone

That being said, I have no objections to making the above change; I still
wouldn't encourage people to use whitespace, though, given that it isn't
always going to work unless the server handles AUTHINFO specially.

> 2.2.1: we discussed briefly a separate response code meaning "invalid
> base64 string". The logical code for this is 504 (it belongs in the 50x
> space and this is the next unused code). There's still time to put that
> in [NNTP], incidentally.

I have no objections to this.  It seems like a reasonable idea.

> 5: I don't believe that it's appropriate to say that an identity looks
> like an email address, particularly since the concept isn't used
> anywhere in this document. At most you need just the last paragraph, but
> the rest better belongs in [USEFOR].

Agreed.  I wouldn't try to be at all precise about what authentication
identities look like; it's going to depend on the server and on the
desires of the local administrator.

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