ietf-nntp 32/64 bit question

[Anton Chr. Lauridsen]

When seeing the numbers quoted for various high volume groups it is
tempting to give in, but who is to say that NNTP will only be used for
USENET? Today we are seeing SMTP being used for inter-process
communications, who is to say this will not be the case for NNTP? NNTP
is in my view a much overlooked protocol, that can be used in a lot of
scenarios other than USENET. I for one can definitely see how NNTP has
application areas where automated responses definitely will apply.

I realize that requiring all news readers to be able to support 64 bit
article numbers is a tall order, and a means to enable slow migration
might be in order, but if this is not the time to start this transition,
one may wonder when it will be. A simple solution may be to allocate
response codes 203 and 204 as welcome messages for servers that use 64
bit integers as article numbers, this way a client can tell if it may
run into trouble.

/anton