[ietf-nntp] I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-nntpext-authinfo-00.txt

[Ken Murchison]

Clive D.W. Feather wrote:

  > No, I'm talking about:
> 
>     In NNTP, a server challenge that contains no data is
>     defined as a 383 reply with no text part.  Note that there is still
>     a space following the reply code, so the complete response line is
>     "383 ".
> 
> This is breaking NNTP-BASE concepts. *ANY* response in NNTP can be followed
> by arbitrary junk and *ALL* responses must have consistent syntax so that
> they can be parsed easily. I see no grounds to break this. Consider:
> 
>     [C] AUTHINFO SASL DIGEST-MD5
>     [S] 383 This is a piece of trailing junk.

Why can't an extension dictate the syntax and content of a response code 
specific to itself?  Most, if not all, AUTHINFO SASL implementations are 
probably going to have special code to handle the SASL exchanges 
anyways, so having a strict syntax for the challenge response doesn't 
seem like a big deal to me.

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
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