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

[Ken Murchison]

Clive D.W. Feather wrote:

> 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, 

OK, I missed this in the base draft.  I'm not sure that I like the fact 
that the base document prohibits any and all extensions to dictate its 
own response syntax (within the given framework) just because it seems a 
little shortsighted.  But I'm not going to argue too strongly against 
this and I'll just use "383 =" as an empty challenge.  There is no need 
for "*" to represent no challenge, because if there is no challenge, 
then we should be returning either a success or failure response code.

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
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