Message from Greg Andruk: ietf-nntp NNTP and 16-bit charsets

[Charles Lindsey]

In <3AF224F5.DADA2A50 at verio.net> "Stan O. Barber" <sob at verio.net> writes:


>Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> wrote:

>[long lines]
>> I've heard that C News has a problem with them; I'm not sure how widely
>> deployed C News is still.

>C News itself seems okay, but nntpd's spawn.c likes to break long
>lines into NNTP_STRLEN [512 chars] chunks and insert linefeeds.  I'm
>not sure if that's intentional behavior (it's just possible that some
>flavor of inews or rnews needed protection, anyone know?), but it will
>break all the same.

That is part of your model NNTP implementation (there is also a very
simplified NNTP daemon that comes with CNEWS, but I expect most people use
your model version - certainly I do.

OK, that behaviour is going to be broken by our new standard whatever
happens, because it does not even permit the magical 998. But I have
looked at the code, and it is almost trivial to fix it. Note that the
problem also exists with IHAVE.

I also note that code does special things with NUL, so I think we now have
sufficient examples of that to be sure that we must forbid NUL in
multiline responses.

But I have heard nothing yet that would suggest we need to limit the line
length at all.

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