[NNTP] Consensus?

Kai Henningsen kaih at khms.westfalen.de
Fri Aug 12 13:40:00 PDT 2005


clive at demon.net (Clive D.W. Feather)  wrote on 11.08.05 in <20050811082704.GE51754 at finch-staff-1.thus.net>:

> Finally, think how it actually would go into the wording. To remind you,
> this is what the text currently says:
>
>    The second type of key is
>    composed of a newsgroup name and an article number within that
>    newsgroup.
> [...]
>    Article numbers MUST lie between 1 and 4,294,967,295 inclusive.
>
> [In the following I'll use the "2^N-1" notation for clarity.]

How about something like:

  Article numbers MUST be larger or equal to 1.
  Note 1: Some current server and client implementations limit article
          numbers to 2^31-1.
  Note 2: It is expected that some servers will exceed article numbers of
          2^32 a few years after publishing this spec.

That is, do it as advice to implementers, not as a MUST or SHOULD. "This  
is what you will actually encounter."

NB. It so happens that I know of another implementation that seems to use  
global article numbers, though it isn't anywhere near the number limit as  
it doesn't actually take a feed. It is a NNTP access module to a web board  
(and the only name for the software I know is "Webboard"), which  
incidentally is quite buggy as I found out when using my normal NNTP pull  
script on it :-/ I think one of the half a dozen or so problems was  
actually my bug (pipelining too early).

The installation I know about is on bar.baen.com. (For one, it currently  
uses message ids lacking any domain part. Needed to patch my local INN to  
make it accept the things. It's an excellent mispropagation prevention aid  
:-))

MfG Kai



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