[NNTP] CAPABILITIES problem!

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Russ Allbery said:
> Given that, it seems cleanest to just remove the limit; that's a fairly
> minimal change to the document.  It's a more aggressive change to the
> standard, however.  Can anyone on the list think of any reason why
> removing this length limit entirely would cause any problems with existing
> software?

Clients, no, because they only deal with existing commands.

Servers that are broken by it aren't sufficiently defensive.

> (I guess I do see *one* reason for a limit -- the length of commands that
> take message IDs as arguments directly affects the maximum message ID
> length that NNTP can deal with, given the overall limit on the length of
> commands.  But I'm inclined to let people defining new commands that take
> message ID arguments worry about that, rather than limiting everything
> just for the sake of that one issue.)

Note that message IDs are limited to 250 characters including the < and >,
while command lines are limited to 510 plus CRLF.

Okay, so the proposed wording (having seen your later message) is:`

    A "keyword" MUST consist only of US-ASCII letters, digits, and the
    characters dot (".") and dash ("-"), and MUST begin with a letter.
    Keywords MUST be at least three characters.

      keyword = ALPHA 2*(ALPHA / DIGIT / "." / "-")

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <clive at demon.net>   | Tel:    +44 20 8495 6138
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