Re: NNTP client considerations; how to avoid 480 error?

(Sorry for talking to myself here ...)

era <[email protected]> writes:
> Turns out a few of the groups I want to poll simply seem to always
> return this error, regardless of how exactly I try to access them.
>
> Weirdly, accessing them from Gnus or slrnpull was never a problem. I
> wonder what secret sauce I need to give my Python script access to them?

Belatedly (sic) I think I have an explanation.

https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/73157 is a pesky bug in the
Python (now retired) nntplib module which causes it to go out of whack
when it thinks there was an error with too long lines in the response
from the server.

There was a patch with a fix but it was never accepted before the
library was pruned from the Python standard library.

The quick and dirty fix is to set nntplib._MAXLINE = 65536.

Now that the library is no longer part of the standard library, you
could pip insstall nntplib and hack it; or you can just set the value in
your own script after import nntplib.

--
If this were my real .signature, it would suck less.  Well, perhaps not.