[NNTP] CAPABILITIES problem!

[Russ Allbery]

Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:

> I can't believe we all missed this. The IANA registry people have just
> pointed it out to me.

> In 3.3.1 we define a capability label as being a keyword.
> In 2 we state that a keyword MUST be at least 3 characters and MUST NOT
>   exceed 12 characters.
> [Both these are repeated in the formal syntax.]
> In 3.3.2 we specify the capability label IMPLEMENTATION.

> Which is 14 characters long.

> Possible solutions:
> (1) Relax the 12 character limit to something longer (where did it come
> from anyway?).
> (2) Relax the requirement for the label to be a keyword.
> (3) Change the keyword to something shorter, like SERVER_INFO.

I think the easiest thing to do at this point is just change it, since I
don't think anyone has started implementing CAPABILITIES yet.  Since the
choice of keywords is fairly arbitrary, whereas lengths might (probably
won't, but might) have subtle consequences, changing the keyword at this
stage seems like the lowest impact change.

Ned, Scott, is this something that we can take care of in author's 48, or
do we need to do something more formal?

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