Re: NNTP authentication problem with Pan...

[Matthew Berg <wdomburg pce net>]

e.Messiah@superpimp.org wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Oct 06, 1999 at 01:54:40AM -0400, Matthew Berg wrote:
> > First off, I want to thank e.Messiah for writing Pan.  It truly is a
> > sight for sore eyes after using Netscape Mail for the past 3 years.
> 
> Thanks!

Welcome:) 

> I implemented it the easy way so that I wouldn't have to check for
> authentication requests every time Pan issued a command.  So far this
> hasn't caused any problems, and I probably won't try to fix it until
> someone reports a server that can't handle authentication at the start
> of the session.
> (Or unless somebody makes a real convincing argument, and/or provides
> some nice patches :) )

Well, I got mail from another user (Dave Lewis) who ran into the same
problem with DNEWS as I did; so it is at least an issue with DNEWS 5.X
implementations that don't require per user authorization. 

I may actually sit down with the source code sometime this week and
write a patch to implement this behaviour.  

Personally, I think this is a shortcoming of the NNTP protocal. I would
have much prefered if any challenge for authentication came at the
beginning of the conversation.  After that, any "not authorized"
response could be assumed to be a protected resource that you are not
privy to. 

Ah well, I could bitch about protocals all day though :) 

> This feature is most definately planned.  We will use the Gnome
> MIME settings to launch "handlers" for binary attachements.

Very cool. :)  It occured to me that it might be feasible in Gnome 2.0
to invoke a Bonobo object to display verious MIME types inline. That
would be seriously cool. 

Matt