[NNTP] LIST EXTENSIONS (again)

[Mark Crispin]

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Russ Allbery wrote:
> My guess would be that you added the code for interoperability with a
> fairly old C News site.  That would explain why I've never heard of it; at
> the time it was still in use, I was using VMS and had never heard of the
> Internet.

The term "C News" sure sounds familiar.

For what it is worth, I have been on the Internet (or its ARPAnet 
predecessor) for 30 years.

>> Actually, 580 makes more sense than 480.  Ditto 481 and 482.  Someone
>> evidentally misunderstands the meaning of 4xx response codes.  I've kept
>> silent on this problem because NNTP is so broken in other respects that
>> are more important to fix.  The world will continue to survive even if
>> NNTP continues to misuse of 4xx.
> 4xx has never, from the very beginning of the NNTP protocol, meant the
> same thing that it meant in other protocols.  So that one you can blame on
> the original RFC 977 authors, but all subsequent status codes are just
> staying consistent with RFC 977.

As I said, NNTP is broken in many respects.  It is a particularly bad form 
of breakage to copy, but misuse, a protocol architecture from other 
protocols (e.g. SMTP, FTP).  NNTP's misuse of 4xx seems to have been 
unintentional rather than open defiance of the architecture.

Nevertheless, I don't think that it's worth trying to fix this.  There are 
other matters which are more important to fix.  It's much higher priority 
from my perspective to get MODE READER flushed.

-- Mark --

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