[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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