[NNTP] LIST EXTENSIONS (again)

[Mark Crispin]

On Mon, 8 Nov 2004, Russ Allbery wrote:
> What would you think of documenting port 433 for transit connections in
> the standard and saying that transit feeds SHOULD use port 433 instead of
> port 119?  That to me seems like the most viable way of eliminating MODE
> READER.

I think that this is an *excellent* solution.

> Redesigning INN so that it can handle reader and transit connections with
> the same daemon on the same port is something that would essentially
> require rewriting INN completely.

Well...there *are* shortcuts that allow this to be accomplished, as long 
as you don't care about the cosmetics of the result... :-)

> Basically, you're talking about a design change on the order of merging an
> MTA and an IMAP server into a single daemon.

Believe me, many people have tried to do just that to IMAP.

It can be argued that client NNTP is effectively a merge of POP3 and SMTP 
because of the POST command in NNTP.

> (In retrospect, having the
> transit and reader components of NNTP be the same protocol was a huge
> mistake.)

You'll hear no dispute from me on that point!!

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.