[ietf-nntp] :bytes metadata

[Russ Allbery]

Ken Murchison <ken at oceana.com> writes:

> Forgive my ignorance, but where does the magic value 999 come from?

Maximum length of an unwrapped header.

> Do we really need this abstract bracketing of the value?  What's wrong
> with stating that :bytes is an estimate which MUST NOT be less than the
> canonical size?

Significant portions of Usenet will ignore the standard because they won't
re-engineer their software to have that number available (the work
required in some cases is extensive) and in practice :bytes will be within
a particular range of variation anyway.  Client authors will just curse
the standard for not telling them how software really works.

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