From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar-usefor@algonet.se)
Date: Sat Jul 07 2001 - 14:16:10 CDT
Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk) writes:
> The specific restrictions (to be applied in the absence of
> established policies to the contrary) are:
Let's see if I understand this correctly. The restriction in the list
can be seen as the default policy, to be applied in un-managed hierachies
like alt.* and free.*.
> 1. The following characters are forbidden, subject to the comments
> and notes at the end of the list:
So in a managed hierachy some of these characters may be permitted, if
local management says so?
This is alright to me, but I think some extra stress should be put on
what is absolutely verboten and what is the default restriction. Yes,
the exact list is in the grammar, but some accompanying text can be of
use.
> NOTE: This requirement was in [RFC 1036] but nevertheless
> several such groups have appeared in practice and implementors
> should be prepared for them. A common implementation technique
> uses each component as the name of a directory and uses numeric
> filenames for each article within a group. Such an
> implementation needs to be careful when this could cause a clash
> (e.g. between article 123 of group xxx.yyy and the directory for
> group xxx.yyy.123).
> [Open issue a number of people think this should not be a default
> requirement but simply be a NOTE; wording for such is further down.]
I don't know why you keep this issue open. For me it is closed. It's a
NOTE, period.
> Since future extensions to this standard and the Unicode standard,
> plus any relaxations of the default restrictions introduced by
> specific hierarchies, might invalidate some such checks, warnings,
> and adjustments, implementations MUST incorporate means to disable
> them. In particular, implementations must be prepared for a
> relaxation of the normalization requirements (e.g. from NFKC down to
> NFC), which have been made rather stringent due to a lack of
> practical experience in this area.
This is good.
-- Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar@algonet.se