Subject: Re: [NNTP] Article number wording

From: "Clive D.W. Feather" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 09:33:06 +0100

Thomas Gschwind said:
>>>     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?

It means that we don't know! That's the point.

> 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.

I've subsequently suggested wording that warns developers about the perils
of too-low limits on numbers. We can't make this sort of thing a SHOULD
because it's not a protocol issue.

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