[NNTP] Notes on auxiliary documents

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Charles Lindsey said:
>>> Sections 2.4.2 and 6: we say that the server MUST discard all knowledge. 
>>> Does this include NNTP state?

I see that the current wording (06pre1) says that it does.

> Suppose you are in Group A, happily reading articles. Suppose you now
> encounter an article cross-posted to the restricted group B. The server
> invites you to authenticate, which you do. You would now like to be in the
> same NNTP state as before, still in Group A with the crossposted article
> still the current article, so you can now read it.

Very true. This suggests that the state should *not* be reset.

On the other hand, all the client needs to do is to re-issue the GROUP and
ARTICLE commands to get back to where it was. And this ensures that the
state really is what the client thought, even if someone was spoofing the
connection previously.

Um, if the ARTICLE fails for some other reason the current article number
will be wrong. There's no way to set it in this case; there are always edge
cases that break things.

> OTOH, what happens if you are unable to authenticate? Is there some way
> that you can remain in the same group, ignore that article, and continue
> reading the rest of the articles in the group?

If authentication fails, the server state should be unaffected; you ignore
the 480 error and just issue a NEXT (or whatever).

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