ietf-nntp Re: DRAFT Basic-Format v0.2

[Charles Lindsey]

In sob at academ.com (Stan Barber) wrote:

>> Is is really the case that your latest draft allows the response to an
>> ARTICLE command to contain NULs and isolated CRs and LFs? And with no
>> limit on the length of a "line"? And with no requirement to have a CRLF
>> anywhere (even at the end of an article - that is the difficulat point, I
>> guess)?

>If you would specifically quote any text in the current draft that supports
>your assertions then we can look into fixing them. Obviously, this is
>confusing you and is certainly not supposed to be in the draft.

I was asking questions, not making assertions.

>The specific line length limitations are on the length of commands sent to 
>server by the client. 

AIUI a command sent to the client is limited to 512 octets (a bit on the
shorside for NEWNEWS commands, but that is another matter).

As regards complete news articles coming from the server, all I can see in
your draft is in section 4 where it speaks of multi-line responses. The
first response line, terminated by CRLF, is presumably a response code.
After that, there may be any number of lines terminated by CRLF, but there
is no mention of any maximum line length, so presumably one line of a
million bytes is in order. There must be a "last line" terminated by CRLF,
followed by a line with a single "." on it (dot stuffing required as
usual). There is no prohibition of NULs or of isolated CRs and LFs. So it
would seems that an article in pure binary would be in order provided it
has a CRLF at the end. Is that correct?

AFAICS (10.3.1, 10.3.2) an article sent TO the server uses exactly the
same rules.

BTW, if there WERE to be a limit on line length, it ought to be at least
998 octets plus CRLF to conform with established usage (see DRUMS, for
example).

Sent to usenet-format and ietf-nntp lists. Note Reply-To: usenet-format
where this discussion originated in a suggestion from Brad that news ought
to be "binary clean" (I personally disagree with that idea BTW).

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing-------------------------
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