ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question

[Nick Christenson]

> 
> On Tue, 14 Jan 1997, Stan Barber wrote:
> 
> > No, there is no RFC specification of this. The generally accepted practice
> > is that each segment of the name should be no longer than 14 characters
> > and each segment should consist of only lowercase alphabetical characters, 
> > numbers and the dash character. There can be any number of segments. The first
> > segment generally indicates which "hierarchy" the group is associated with.
> 
> Hum, I'm noting a lot of them have '_' (underscore) which you don't 
> mention.

I believe we should stick with the general accepted practice of lowercase
alphabet, numbers and "-".  Also, shouldn't we require that each segment
begin with an alpha character to prevent groups with names like alt.2600
which have number only segments, potentially causing problems with
confusing articles and group directories?  I know that INN handles this
well, but I believe it is a practice worth discouraging.  I have 
friends still running CNews and annecdotally, I hear that these
groups cause them problems.  

Note also that no newsgroups in the Big 8 have "_" in their names, 
so not using the "_" is also widely recognized.

> That, however, doesn't particularly bother me.  What does is the 14 
> character limit.  The reason is because I'm starting to see perfectly 
> legitimate newsgroups with bastardised names, such as 
> clari.news.childrn+family.
> 
> The 14 character limit was imposed when that's all you could get out of
> the filesystem.  Today, it is not necessary and is a hindrance to
> common-sense newsgroup naming, and I suspect it is a big problem for
> foreign-language newsgroups which seem to have much larger names (I'm
> thinking of the Finnish groups in particular, but they certainly aren't
> the only ones.)

I'm not sure I really care that much, but we ought to make certain
that there are no common client implementations that do this.  I 
seem to recall that there are certainly historic implementations that
might care.

> I think the specification should unrestrict the length of individual
> newsgroup parts, but that the total newsgroup length (which is not
> currently specified AFAIK) should be restricted to, say, 127 or 255 
> characters.  The longest newsgroup name I have in my active is 72 
> characters, so 127 isn't an unreasonable upper limit.  
> 
> Lightening the restrictions on groups as I suggested would give needed 
> freedom in naming, and setting the maximum group length at 255 or less 
> takes care of the 255 character POSIX filename limit, but still keeps the 
> alt.* people in check :-)

One thing I'm concerned about is the RFC 977 restriction on limiting
response line length to 512 characters.  With .overview entries of
crossposted articles to many newsgroups, and each newsgroup name potentially
127 bytes long, it doesn't take too many groups before one overruns this
limit, or am I confused in that this restriction only involves command
requests.  If this is covered elsewhere, I apologize.

-- 
Nick Christenson
npc at earthlink.net