From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Sep 22 1999 - 05:14:35 CDT
In <19990921163058.E11052@demon.net> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive@demon.net> writes:
>> 6.7. Distribution
>> [I have now put '+', '-' and '_' back. I am more liberal than Henry in
>> allowing uppercase letters, which in fact are commonly used, and in
>> not specifying any 14 character limit.]
>Why is dot not allowed ? Or are we trying to prevent the idea of
>distribution hierarchies happening ?
Because it never has been (see son-of-1036). Here are some of you trying
to cut features out of Distribution, and others trying to add new ones :-(.
OK, can you give an example of how distribution hierarchies might be
useful?
>> [Note: we could be more liberal here and permit CFWS rather than FWS,
>> perhaps even encourqaging people to explain in a comment what a
>> cryptic distribution actually meant.]
>Sounds a good idea to me.
Other opinions? The only other places we currently forbid comments in
headers is in Newsgroups and Path, where we want software to be able to
process them as rapidly as possible. That argument is much weaker for
Distributions.
>ISO 3166 reserves "aa", "qm" to "qz", "xa" to "xz", and "zz" for individual
>use; they can *not* be allocated as country codes. We might want to permit
>them. Or people may view this as too esoteric to matter.
I think the present rule in our draft, that you must use 3 characters for
anything that is not a country name, is safer.
>> 6.12. Xref
>> location = newsgroup-name ":" article-locator
>> [ CFWS ( "revise" / "repost )
>Missing quote.
This, and many other typos reported, now fixed.
>> 6.16.2.1. Message version numbers
>> 1. If the id-left-side of the most recent predecessor's message
>> identifier contains a leftmost version-number "$v=<n>", where
>> <n> is an integer version number, possibly followed by one or
>> more random-dollars-sequences, the replacement message
>> identifier should be obtained by replacing the <n> with the
>> integer <n+1> and providing a different random-dollars-
>> sequence(s). For example <foo$v=3$XYZ@faq-site.example> becomes
>> <foo$v=4$PQR@faq-site.example>.
>Here and subsequently, I'd feel a lot happier if the random dollar sequence
>could easily be told from any future extension. For example, by requiring
>it (or at least the first one) to be "$r=XYZ" and "$r=PQR". In other words,
>a more generic version of:
>> Clearly, any random-dollars-
>> sequence used for this purpose must not itself be mistakable
>> for a version-number.
I have now added, at the proper place:
"Any random-dollars-sequence so added MUST NOT start with "$<l>=" for any
letter <l>."
and removed the "Clearly, ..." sentence from the NOTE.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Voice/Fax: +44 161 437 4506 Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5