[NNTP] draft-ietf-nntpext-authinfo-05 & draft-ietf-nntpext-tls-nntp-03

Clive D.W. Feather clive at demon.net
Mon Oct 18 03:23:56 PDT 2004


Russ Allbery said:
>>> In authinfo-05, section 2.2, para 5 (of 7) I don't see the point of the
>>> last sentence and in particular the SHOULD. See the similar comment on
>>> the TLS document for details.
>> This dovetails with the fact that the capabilties might change after
>> auth/tls and the client should check for this.  Russ, care to comment? 
>> I'm not married to this at this point, so I'll let the chair decide.
> As I understand it, any time that the capabilities change, the client
> needs to query them again in order for the extensions mechanism to work
> the way that it works for other protocols.  Therefore, the only time that
> a client should continue without sending LIST EXTENSIONS is if they intend
> to not use any extensions whatsoever,

Okay so far. But the following paragraph already explains that the contents
might change and why, and section 6 explains that you must discard any
knowledge of extensions when SASL comes into effect. If the client runs
into either of these situations, it will (re-)send LIST EXTENSIONS anyway.
If it doesn't, it has no need to and so the SHOULD is wrong.

I suggest dropping this sentence and merging the two paragraphs.

> and if we're advertising the NNTP
> protocol version in LIST EXTENSIONS as well, I think it would be better to
> just have clients always send it.

I don't follow the logic. The NNTP protocol version will not change just
because you've authenticated (I hope!). So asking for it again doesn't tell
you anything.

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <clive at demon.net>   | Tel:    +44 20 8495 6138
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