[NNTP] Re: Nearly there

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Russ Allbery said:
>> 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.

If I understood what Scott said, we can make such changes at AUTH48
provided it's been through the working group.

> >     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.

The first part was in lieu of anyone coming up with a mutually acceptable
proposal in the timescale. The second part is a blatant hint to developers
not to use 32-bit variables in the future.

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