[NNTP] Article number wording
Russ Allbery
rra at stanford.edu
Mon Jul 18 14:37:58 PDT 2005
Forrest J Cavalier <forrest at mibsoftware.com> writes:
> Russ Allbery wrote:
>> + This standard imposes no maximum limit on article numbers other than
>> + the maximum length of an NNTP command. Implementors are encouraged
>> + to support arbitrarily large article numbers and SHOULD use at least
>> + the largest integer type their software can support. However, note
>> + that many widely deployed NNTP clients cannot handle article numbers
>> + larger than 2,147,483,647 or 4,294,967,295 and article numbers higher
>> + than that are likely to cause interoperability problems.
> Yes, as an implementor, I'd read that as indicating bignums. It doesn't
> give any indication of Steve Walker's implementation being in the wild.
> How about....
> + This standard imposes no maximum limit on article numbers other than
> + the maximum length of an NNTP command. Note that many widely deployed
> + NNTP clients do not handle article numbers larger than 2,147,483,647 or
> + 4,294,967,295, and no widely known clients or servers handle article
> + numbers larger than 18,446,744,073,709,551,615.
You lost the only SHOULD in the paragraph, as well as any idea of using
the largest native integer type. I don't like this as well; it doesn't
seem to give the implementor any real guidance.
--
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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