ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question

[Evan Champion]

On Tue, 14 Jan 1997, Stan Barber wrote:

> Evan, no one including myself is saying that there is a standard in this area.
> I was writing what I have observed over the life of USENET as being the
> general practice for the core seven/eight hierarchies.

I was sure that Dave Lawrence pointed me to a draft that specified 
newsgroup name lengths etc.  Of course, it might have been an expired 
document or not on any sort of standards track.

> If we do have to define a standard in this area for the purpose of doing
> RFC 977 bis, then we do need to come to some definition that does not break
> group names in the core seven/eight hierarchies. I don't know if we have to
> accomodate naming in alt, regionals or some of the other hierarchies.

Well, what I was proposing was _less_ restrictive except for length, which
I suggested as being at least 50 characters larger than the largest group
I have in my active (basically UUNET's active).  I think that would
suffice for pretty much everyone and would certainly take care of the core
groups. 

At any rate, if this isn't the right forum for this sort of discussion, 
then we should either move it or put it on hold for now.  The newsgroup 
length issue is something that I would like to see taken care of quickly, 
however, and since it isn't likely to cause much in the way of argument 
(I wouldn't suspect, if we limit ourselves to just length/character set 
issues) it is something that could be easily put in to any future NNTP 
document.

Evan
--
Evan Champion            * Director, Network Operations
mailto:evanc at synapse.net * Directeur, Exploitation du reseau
http://www.synapse.net/  * Synapse Internet