[NNTP] Revisiting POST as a separate capability

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Russ Allbery said:
>> Surely the point is that a server that does not advertise READER is a
>> transit-only server,
> 
> Why would you assume that?  That's certainly one possible use for it, but
> all that not advertising READER means is that the reader commands
> (ARTICLE, GROUP, etc.) are not supported.
> 
> There's nothing inconsistent about supporting POST without supporting the
> reader commands.

There's nothing technically inconsistent, no.

However, we currently have two commands that do almost the same thing:
POST and IHAVE. The only protocol-level difference (except that different
response codes are used) is that the latter specifies a message-id on the
command line and the former does not.

The *reason* for having these two separate commands is, as we say, that one
is intended to signal "new article" and the other "relayed article". The
former is very unlikely to happen unless the client is also doing
newsreading. Yes, there's nothing inconsistent about POST without READER,
but do we want to encourage it? I would suggest that we don't.

Looking back through the archives, it seems that we decided that this was
probably the best choice. I don't see a good reason to change it.

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