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

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Ken Murchison said:
>> 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?

Because we wrote:

    to simplify interpretation by the client the number and type of such
    arguments is fixed for each response code, as is whether or not the
    code introduces a multi-line response. Any extension MUST follow this
    principle as well, 

[We acknowledge that LISTGROUP/211 breaks this, but it's the only one.]

The whole point of this wording was to allow clients to have a standard
response-parsing module. Even if:

> Most, if not all, AUTHINFO SASL implementations are 
> probably going to have special code to handle the SASL exchanges 
> anyways,

that doesn't mean that code won't call the standard "get and parse a
response" module.

(1) To change this requires changing the base document. I, for one, will
oppose any such change.

(2) It's equally easy for the server to return "383 *" as "383 ", and it's
equally easy for the client to go:

    switch (arglist [1][0])
    {
    case '*': /* no response code ...     */ break;
    case '=': /* empty response code ...  */ break;
    default:  /* base64 response code ... */ break;
    }

as:

    if (n_args == 0)
        /* no response code ...     */ ... ;
    switch (arglist [1][0])
    {
    case '=': /* empty response  code ... */ break;
    default:  /* base64 response code ... */ break;
    }

Indeed, if a standard parsing module is used it may well be easier.

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