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Re: message IDs (was Re: mail vs. news ???)

2003-02-24 22:56:48

On Tue, 25 Feb 2003, Bruce Lilly wrote:
This contention utterly baffles me.  Please explain.

Mark can certainly speak for himself, but my interpretation of
what he wrote is that NNTP could choose to use the bracketing
as a way around the lack of general quoting...

Note omitted context:  the "contention" to which I was referring was
"doesn't belong in the header format specification", not "possible to
define this [bracketing] as a quoting rule".  I'm a bit skeptical of the
latter, but it's the former -- the assertion that a constraint crucial to
news interoperability has no place in the standard -- that I find bizarre.

I wouldn't want to see the issue put in a separate document.
It is part and parcel of the definition of a msg-id...
And certainly the definition of msg-id -- including any length
limit -- should apply uniformly with one possible exception...

I concur completely.  (And for those who don't read Usefor, it is *not*
common for Bruce and I to agree on something.)

...I would point out that none of RFCs 822, 850,
or 1036 mentioned any sort of message-id upper length limit...
...So it appears that we are now considering
introducing a formal limit lower than the inherent limit of
997 octets because those explicit cautions were disregarded.
OK, let's not fix the blame, let's fix the problem.

There is no particular difficulty fixing the blame:  it's my fault.
I either introduced it or failed to fix it -- I no longer remember the
exact history of the particular bits of code -- when I overhauled the
dbz indexing package, extensively used in news software, circa 1990.

Unfortunately, I can think of no way to fix the problem.  Descendants of
my dbz release are still *very* widely used in news infrastructure, and
almost all still have this restriction.  Decreeing removal of the limit
will not accomplish it any time soon, and it's a net-wide interoperability
issue, not something that can be fixed (or automatically negotiated) one
host or one region at a time.  Even if it is thought desirable to make a
major effort to lift it in the long run -- and I'm unsure it's worth it --
the most we can do is "MUST accept, MUST NOT generate yet".

By analogy, it would seem a fine idea to move mail's 7-bit restriction
into a BCP.  Do you agree?  If not, why not?  Surely such an antiquated
and mail-specific limitation doesn't belong in "the header format 
specification".

Bad analogy...

Imperfect analogy, but my point was that what's sauce for the goose is
sauce for the gander:  news's message-ID interoperability issues are at
least as widespread in news -- tens of thousands of hosts, many different
software packages -- as mail's 7-bit interoperability issues are in mail,
and classing one as a vital part of the standard while dismissing the
other as merely "best practice" seems grossly inconsistent. 

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       
henry(_at_)spsystems(_dot_)net



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