From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar@algonet.se)
Date: Tue Nov 04 1997 - 17:31:12 CST
Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk) writes:
>Just because some broken readers don't give you access to the newsgroups
>file ...
I have noticed that trn goes away and fetches it, but only when I
post. Often this goes smoothly, but sometimes the server does not
respond, or something just hangs, and have to kill the process.
Now, I use trn from one of my ISP:s Unix servers. I am very glad
that my PC reader does not get the idea of downloading the file!
In any case, I notice that you fail to refer to an RFC for it. I
have to say that you have a weak case.
>However, we are trying, elsewhere in our document, so say that lines
>intended to be read by humans (notably the body) SHOULD fit into 79
>characters (that is why we are trying to allow Newsgroup and Path headers
>to be wrapped). Lines in the newsgroups file are also intended to be read
>by humans. Ergo ...
True, but the important thing here is that newsreader authors should
not build something into their newsreader which they shouldn't. Few
people will like 79 char names, but if an hierarchy feels that this
is important it is their choice. And we are not restricting the
message id to 79 chars, are we?
>You will break existing software (notably CNEWS) if you permit characters
>other than lowercase, '+', '-', '_' in newsgroup names.
Didn't you recently share with you a draft which suggesting using
non-ASCII chars in newsgroups names? If CNEWS chokes on ";" in group
names, it will choke on se.test.räksmörgås be it Latin-1 or UTF-8
as well. If there are problems with chars in the ASCII range, I
don't mind outlawing them. But CNEWS will not have more or less
problems with "§" than it will have with "ä". (Well, the UTF-8
coding of "§" will include a an octet in the 128-159 range, but
it should have any importance.)
>What is the benefit? To allow people to create even more joke
>names in alt.*?
To not prevent needs in the future which may not predict when there
is no reason to.
-- Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar@algonet.se