[NNTP] Snapshot 4

[Russ Allbery]

Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:

> Okay, a fourth snapshot is in the usual place:
>     <http://www.davros.org/nntp-texts/draft25.pre-4.txt>
>     <http://www.davros.org/nntp-texts/draft25.pre-4.html>

Some more general comments on this:

I really dislike the leading underscores on _VERSION, _TRANSIT, and
_READER.  Since we have an IANA registry for extensions, there is no
concern about namespace conflict; unlike with C or POSIX, we have a
central body that can administer the namespace.  I would really prefer all
of the extension labels to look the same, the way that other protocols do.

In the initial connection section, I would mention explicitly that
CAPABILITIES will return far more useful information about whether the
client can post than the initial response code does (in particular, it
will change appropriately based on the authentication state).  The initial
response indicator for posting vs. read-only has been a disaster in
practice, and servers have to return 200 if there is even any possibility
that a client might be able to post after authentication, since otherwise
some clients will give up and not even try.  The expressiveness is just
too limited.

I would still rather see something like NNTPv2 rather than VERSION 2, but
I don't feel strongly enough about it to really debate it if no one else
agrees with me.  This won't hurt anything.

I don't see any point in the _SERVER line.  Traditionally, this
information is returned in the initial greeting.  It isn't really a
capability and clients should be actively *discouraged* from attributing
any meaning to it or using it to guess capabilities, so I think putting it
into CAPABILITIES is sending the wrong message.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>