ietf-nntp NNTP and 16-bit charsets

[Charles Lindsey]

In <yl7l02yux4.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>Note that USEFOR currently requires relaying agents to support lines of
>unlimited length (at the MUST level), which would imply that relaying
>agents are required to apply some sort of transparent and reversible
>content encoding to deal with longer lines if they have a lower limit.  I
>think that's a bit of the tail wagging the dog; the limit should be
>relaxed in the primary transport protocol first and then it can be relaxed
>in the message format description.

What USEFOR actually says is that injectors/servers and the like MUST
support at least 998 and SHOULD support unlimited. Pure relayers MUST
support unlimited. So it would seem that present INN behaviour is
consistent with both MUSTs, which is fine. It also suggests that there
should be NO limit in NNTP (I don't think it worth distinguishing between
relaying and serving in NNTP, because the ARTICLE command gets used for
both).

>So after further research, this does appear to be a change, and therefore
>may be on shakier ground than I'd thought.

It's a change for the format standards, but not for the transport (since
RFC 977 is silent on the issue AFAICS).

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