[NNTP] Re: Nearly there

[Russ Allbery]

Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:

> Okay, trawling through the archives ...

> (1) Keywords (which include capability names) are limited to 12 characters,
> but we already have a keyword ("IMPLEMENTATION") which is longer than that.
> The majority view was to remove the limit completely:

>     A "keyword" MUST consist only of US-ASCII letters, digits, and the
>     characters dot (".") and dash ("-"), and MUST begin with a letter.
>     Keywords MUST be at least three characters.

>       keyword = ALPHA 2*(ALPHA / DIGIT / "." / "-")

Agreed.

> I'm very nervous about raising this, after all the arguments this time
> last year, but I believe that changing it to 2^31-1 is the correct thing
> to do *FOR THIS VERSION OF THE NNTP SPECIFICATION*.

I won't argue against either 2^31-1 or 2^32-1, but I'm not sure how much
we can get away with changing at this stage in the actual protocol
requirements.

> (3) It was noted that some servers may be getting near this limit and we
> don't yet have a good mechanism for dealing with this. It was therefore
> proposed to add wording saying that this is unsatisfactory but is being
> worked on ready for the next version.

>     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.

>     While servers MUST NOT send article numbers greater than this limit,
>     client and server developers are advised to use internal structures
>     and datatypes capable of handling larger values in anticipation of
>     such a change.

I'm not sure what to think about this.  I think overall it's not a bad
idea, though, and might be helpful.  Since the above doesn't change the
protocol specification, it's more palatable during AUTH48 to me.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>