[NNTP] CAPABILITIES problem!

[Peter Robinson]

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

> Russ Allbery said:
> 
> > (I guess I do see *one* reason for a limit -- the length of commands that
> > take message IDs as arguments [...]

> Note that message IDs are limited to 250 characters including the < and >,
> while command lines are limited to 510 plus CRLF.

So there's plenty of headroom for command names.

> Okay, so the proposed wording (having seen your later message) is:`
> 
>     A "keyword" MUST consist only of US-ASCII letters, digits, and the
>     characters dot (".") and dash ("-"), and MUST begin with a letter.
>     Keywords MUST be at least three characters.
> 
>       keyword = ALPHA 2*(ALPHA / DIGIT / "." / "-")

I support this change.

Bumping into the old limit before CAPABILITIES is even out of the door
is a good indication that this would have been a future annoyance for
extensions.  I had assumed that the 12 character command name limit came
from RFC977, but since that isn't the case I see no reason at all to set
a limit.

Regards,

Peter