[Mailman-Developers] Bug#57223: mailman: gate_news problems (fwd)

[Thomas Wouters]

On Mon, Feb 07, 2000 at 12:53:17PM -0500, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:

> I'm cutting and pasting a message that originated on the mailman-users
> mailing list.  I think this message is fairly self-explanatory.  Can
> other NNTP experts look this over and see if it makes sense?  I'll
> apply it if there are no objections.
> Note: the bare except is bothersome.

I've discussed this with two of my colleagues, who do and have done a fair
lot with INN, and the general concensus is that it should work just fine.
Servers who dont need 'mode reader' but recognize it should ignore it,
Servers who dont understand it should give a 500 error, 'error_perm', with
'unimplemented' or 'what ?' or some such as message text.

Note, though, that i've already posted a small patch to mailman to fix this.
Since the 'group' command is executed by gate_news, which doesn't need
authentication, it's easy enough to try the group, and set the connection to
readermode if it fails. 

Also note that I've already sent a patch to patches@python.org ;) with a
pointer to the mailman-users discussion in question.

http://www.python.org/pipermail/patches/2000-February/000015.html

My patch uses an extra argument to NNTP.__init__, and avoids the bare
except. To get the same behaviour as the patch below, sending 'mode
reader' by default, the default value of readermode can be set to 1. I'm not
sure if that's a wise thing, however, as some users of nntplib.NNTP might
depend on the connection being able to do things that you cant do in
readermode.

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net>

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