[NNTP] Article number wording
Clive D.W. Feather
clive at demon.net
Thu Aug 11 01:33:06 PDT 2005
Thomas Gschwind said:
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> and let that be a warning to implementers.
>
> To me this sounds as good as no warning at all, I as implementor of any
> news client/server software would not know how to interpret this. Does
> it mean using 64 bit ints as article numbers in the future or does it
> mean a new mechanism will be developed or does it mean some wrap-around
> mechanism will be introduced?
It means that we don't know! That's the point.
> I would at least recommend that news client developers SHOULD use
> 64 bit unsigned integers for storing article numbers in order to
> facilitate a possible expansion of the article number range.
I've subsequently suggested wording that warns developers about the perils
of too-low limits on numbers. We can't make this sort of thing a SHOULD
because it's not a protocol issue.
--
Clive D.W. Feather | Work: <clive at demon.net> | Tel: +44 20 8495 6138
Internet Expert | Home: <clive at davros.org> | Fax: +44 870 051 9937
Demon Internet | WWW: http://www.davros.org | Mobile: +44 7973 377646
Thus plc | |
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