ietf-nntp draft-ietf-nntpext-base-17

Charles Lindsey chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk
Wed Mar 19 03:28:50 PST 2003


In <yl3clmo6oe.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>Charles Lindsey <chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:

>> p18. '?' in wildmats
>>       This is supposed to work with UTF-8 chars. Clearly any existing
>>       implementation of '?' will not so work.

>I don't think this is much of an issue, since the previous NNTP standard
>mandated ASCII parameters, and the change to UTF-8 is specifically noted
>as an incompatibility with RFC 977.  Since wildmats are only applied to
>newsgroup names (and more than that, only to names of newsgroups carried
>on that server), servers can just avoid UTF-8 newsgroup names until the
>wildmat implementation has been upgraded

That's a good pragmatic approach. But you would not get away with it if
Bruce Lilly was reading this list :-( .

>> p53.  Is it possible for the list returned by LIST ACTIVE to be empty?

>Yes.

Then it should say so (it usually does draw attention to the possibility
in other places where it can occur).

>> p55.  "If the optional wildmat parameter is specified, the list is limited to
>>       only the groups whose names match the wildmat (and therefore may
>>       be empty)."

>>       I believe an empty list is possible even when no wildmat is provided.

>Yes.

Ditto.

>> p77. "UTF8-1"

>>       See draft-yergeau-rfc2279bis-04.txt which is currently up for IETF
>>       last call. It includes a full syntax for UTF8, and you need to
>>       check that you conform to that and use their notation. Note also
>>       that they now exclude entirely all those cases which could give
>>       rise to code points beyond U+10FFFF.

>We can switch our reference to this when it's published as an RFC if it's
>done before we are, yes.

It probably will be. But it would be sensible to come into line with his
syntax straight away, since that seems to be the way the UTF-8 world is
moving (note that RFC 2279 contains no syntax at all, so there is no
restaint on our changing now).

Our present syntax uses UTF-1, where Yergeau uses UTF-2 for the same
object (or is it the other way round)? That is the sort of confusion we
could do without.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
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