[NNTP] Re: Nearly there

[Ade Lovett]

On Aug 13, 2006, at 09:20 , Thomas Gschwind wrote:
> Putting in 2^31-1 is fine with me especially considering our charter.

Agreed.  Let's get this done, out the door, and start work on the  
next steps.

> However, I am also very much in favor of putting in a paragraph  
> stating
> that RFC977 did not specify a limit and that there are news servers  
> that
> will generate article numbers larger then that (especially considering
> that some newsgroups may run out of numbers soon) and that clients
> SHOULD be able to handle numbers larger then that limit.  IMHO, we
> cannot suddendly make those compliant news servers non-compliant.

This will make things needlessly wordy.

Right now[1], we're looking at 8.3m articles/day.  Assuming every  
single article went into one group, that gives 258 days before  
wraparound.  The actual worst case[2] is about a tenth of that,  
875000 articles/day, 2454 days, or 6.7 years.  One can certainly make  
the argument for the small percentage of news servers that have to  
deal with this, steps have already been taken to move to (at least)  
64-bit clean.

Provided we get an update document out, mandating (at least) 64-bit  
clean inside of a couple of years (honestly, this is do-able, folks),  
we'll be fine.

977->ThisDoc *cannot* clean up everything.  977->ThisDoc->NewDoc will.

-aDe

[1] http://www.supernews.com/stats/feedvol/
[2] http://www.supernews.com/stats/retention.cgi? 
group=alt.binaries.boneless&type=Exact