Always 224 with XOVER?

[Russ Allbery]

Julien ÉLIE <julien at trigofacile.com> writes:

> Well, the reason why I write is that I changed 224 to 420 when needed
> for XOVER, thinking that it would be right.  Unfortunately, some news
> clients (like Windows Mail...) send a pop-up to tell me "Error 420:  No
> articles in 976-976"!!!!

> Damn it!

Yup.  :)  You can't change return codes for existing commands.  That's why
it was helpful to standardize the command under a different name so that
we could fix various historic problems with the status codes that ended up
being used in implementations.

> I tried with Thunderbird and it does not trigger any error off.  I do
> not know however why it tries HEAD -- maybe it does not rely on the
> result of XOVER :)

It's probably written to fall back on HEAD if XOVER fails for any reason
so that it can work with servers that don't implement XOVER.

> A few news servers correctly implement XOVER (for instance the Columbus
> nntp.perl.org) but I believe we should not try to "improve" XOVER.
>
> Russ, you're right:  it's a bad idea to fix wrong implementations :(
> However, I wonder how people who want to implement XOVER will find out
> that they should not return 420...

I had grand plans of writing up a set of web pages documenting this sort
of thing, but it's unlikely that I'll ever find the time.  :/

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

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