[ietf-nntp] Re: AUTHINFO/SASL responses

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Russ Allbery said:
>>> - SASL challenge/response can't be base64 decoded.  Traditionally, this
>>> is treated as an auth failure, so whatever we decide for failure can be
>>> used.
>> If it can't be decoded, that's a plain syntax error. 501 is the right
>> code for this. Or it should be a new code, say 581.
> Not a new code, please.

Why not?

> Either 501 or 482; I don't have a strong opinion
> about which one.

I feel it should be 5xx - it's syntactic: someone could detect the
error just by looking at the command and our specification, without
knowing what the command arguments mean.

>> As I've said before, you can *NOT* do that because it breaks
>> [NNTP-BASE]; a response must have a single consistent syntax and allow
>> trailing junk.  If you need to distinguish "no success data" from "empty
>> success data" then you need separate arguments for them:
> 
> Oh, whoops, I forgot about that.
> 
> Okay, you're right.  We should use 281 for success with no data and 283
> for success with data.

It doesn't feel right to me, though I'm not going to die in the ditch on
this one. But surely it's better to have one return code and have some way
to distinguish "no data" from "empty data" in the argument?

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