[NNTP] Consensus?

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Richard Clayton said:
> If you meant Clive's BIGNUM proposal
> 
>     http://lists.eyrie.org/pipermail/ietf-nntp/2005-July/001656.html
> 
> I thought it was elegant and looked reasonably straightforward to cope
> with from an implementation point of view -- and had the advantage that
> everyone knew exactly where they were with it.

For the record, I was proposing that as a solution to the overall problem,
but *not* as something to go into the about-to-be-an-RFC. It's the latter
that needs freezing fast.

> It does mean that there is no wrap around -- so clients cannot access
> groups that have overflowed

It would be possible to design extensions for this as well. The two
solutions need not be incompatible.

> so it's not just a case of
> changing a typedef and recompiling, but changing the file format,
> providing a migration tool and such

This could easily be an issue for other client implementations as well.
It's not necessarily a trivial matter.

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