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

[Thomas Wouters]

On Tue, Feb 08, 2000 at 11:47:06AM +0900, Jim Tittsler wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 07, 2000 at 07:17:13PM +0100, Thomas Wouters wrote:

> > 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. 
> 
> I dislike your proposed solution for two reasons:
>   1. It uses the nntplib's shortcmd outside of nntplib, even though it is
>      documented as "internal".
>   2. It doesn't work when you *do* need authentication.  The group command
>      will claim 'No such group' for groups that are hidden by authentication.
>      (One of my mailman run on such a machine.)  You need to do the 'mode
>      reader' before authenticating.
> I still think it better to change nntplib.

So do I. However, Mailman does currently *not* use authentication there, so
this is the simplest fix, including backwards to mailman 1.1. or earlier. I
was not aware that shortcmd() is nntplib-private, though. I assumed it was
public because it does not start with a _. If this is a problem, fixing
nntplib and using a private copy might be the better solution.

> > 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

> I sent a similar nntplib patch to mailman-users last week, although I

Ah, sorry, I dont read mailman-users, apparently. I thought I did, though,
Strange. I'm sorry if I seem to have stolen your idea, it was not
intentional. Anyway, the right place for this patch is not Mailman, it is
Python. nntplib is part of the standard library, nowadays, Mailman only has
its own local copy for compatibility with older python distributions. I'm a
bit fearful of setting readermode so often, though -- aren't there possibly
cases where people want to provide authentication, but do not want
readermode ?

(I'm not concerned with newsservers that dont understand 'mode reader'. If
they barf on that, they are highly likely to barf on everything else you try
out, too. I am concerned with setting a newsconnection to reader when you
dont want a reader -- though I'm not sure what would be the effect.)

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net>

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