[NNTP] Article number wording

Thomas Gschwind tom at infosys.tuwien.ac.at
Fri Jul 29 02:38:26 PDT 2005


On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 11:29:22AM +0200, Matthias Andree wrote:
> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:
> > For now, put in some wording like:
> >
> >     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?  In the end, I guess I would be doing
nothing and leave my implementation to use ints.

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.

This way nothing breaks, we still have all the options available, and
it makes it easier if we want to go that direction for the next version
of the draft.

Regards,
Thomas
-- 
Thomas Gschwind                      Email: thomasg at ieee.org
IBM Zurich Research Lab
Saeumerstrasse 4                     Tel: +41-1-724-8990
CH-8803 Rueschlikon, Switzerland     Fax: +41-1-724-8953



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