ietf-nntp NNTP and 16-bit charsets

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Mon Apr 30 09:49:54 PDT 2001


Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:

> Based on other related discussions, I think that the sender needs to
> assume:
> - NUL is unsafe;

Yes.  Existing software will break on articles containing NUL.

> - CR and LF may only appear in CRLF pairs;

This is a bit iffier, but probably also reasonable.  Some versions of INN
have had problems with stray CR or LF, but that was very clearly a bug in
INN that's now been fixed.

> - any other octet value will survive transmission unchanged;

Yes.

> - the space between CRLF pairs should be no more than 510 octets apart;

nnrpd rejects articles with lines >1024 characters; this is also a bug in
INN that needs to get fixed (I didn't realize that it had this problem
until fairly recently).  Apart from that, in transit, INN handles
unlimited length lines in the article body, and so do all the other
servers I'm aware of.  Is this provision really needed?

I'm quite happy to have nnrpd's current behavior be non-compliant.
Servers should be able to handle unlimited line length.

> and needs to implement dot stuffing (that is, the sequence CRLF"." 
> within the transmitted data is changed to CRLF"..").

Yes.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>



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