[NNTP] Consensus?

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Russ Allbery said:
> (2) I think we've reached a solid consensus on removing the limit.  If
> anyone disagrees, please speak up now.

Nobody did, so I'll update my master text.

> For (1), the discussion has been wide-ranging enough that I'm not sure on
> (a).  I know some folks here would like the limit removed entirely, but I
> don't have a good feeling on what people think about 2^32-1 versus 2^31-1
> assuming that we keep a limit.  More discussion would be valuable there, I
> believe.

The reason for keeping a limit is that it describes existing practice, and
that's what our charter talks about. Recent discussion has shown that some
existing practice uses signed int for this, so 2^31-1 is a genuine limit on
those systems.

> For (b), had you or someone else already posted a specific wording
> suggestion?

    It is likely that at some stage at least one NNTP server will reach the
    limit of 4,294,967,295 in at least one newsgroup. Ways to deal with
    this while not gratuitously breaking compatibility are still being
    investigated and are likely to result in publication of a revision or
    extension to this specification at some future date.

The intent is to not hold up this document while still giving fair warning.

> Would this change include warning people to
> use longer data types as well?

It didn't, as you can see.

I'm loath to add wording that implies that a server can produce a larger
number without the agreement of the client; a client using 32 bit values is
likely to break painfully when it receives that number (either because of
the error from the string-to-number conversion or because the value
silently wraps).

However, something like:

    While servers MUST NOT send article numbers greater than this limit,
    client and server developers are advised to use internal structures
    and datatypes capable of handling larger values in anticipation of
    such a change.

might work.

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