[NNTP] CAPABILITIES problem!

[Charles Lindsey]

In <87ack0nvlb.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>I have no idea why there's a limit either.  We've had a limit, as Ken
>noted, for the entirety of this process, but I don't know why it was added
>in the first place since RFC 977 doesn't have one.

Life is always simpler with strings of a known maximum length (no need to
malloc space every time a new string is encountered). For simple keywords,
intended primarily for internal protocol use, a fixed length is quite
enough. Unlimited length is really only needed to suit the convenience of
human readers/writers (which might apply in the Capabilities case, but not
for command names).

Note that the only effect of the current restriction is to constraint
authors of future extensions (which might simplify parsers).

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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