From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Wed May 08 2002 - 08:11:54 CDT
In <87lmavlqww.fsf@erlenstar.demon.co.uk> Andrew Gierth <andrew@erlenstar.demon.co.uk> writes:
>In addition to those of the SHOULD/MUST items I posted that attempt to
>outlaw existing practice, here is a list of some other incompatibilities:
>1) folding and whitespace in the Path header is known not to work
>correctly with existing servers, especially Diablo which will actually
>drop articles containing a TAB character in the path
I think when this was raised before, we established that the circumstances
in which that problem manifested itself were independent of whether
folding and whitespace happened. In any case, it is clearly a bug in
Diablo, even wrt RFC 1036.
What is clear is that folded Paths propagate well throughout the present
network. The worst to be expected is that they may not be interpreted
incorrectly by some agents, so that articles may get sent to sites through
which they have already passed. We established that no loops could arise
from this.
>2) delimiters other than ! in the Path are known not to work correctly
>with almost everything except INN
Again, such delimiters are allowed under RFC 1036, and they are observed
to propagate well throughout the current network. The new interpretation
of those delimiters will take time to become established, of course.
>3) Folding and whitespace in Newsgroups: is known not to work
>correctly with anything except the Highwind servers
Indeed, but it is hardly rocket science to implement. In the meantime, it
is a SHOULD NOT.
>4) Folding in the Date header, other than at the end, is known not
>to work with Diablo (and probably most other transit servers except
>INN, I haven't tested this)
I agree that the Date format allows too much folding, but we have RFC 2822
to thank for that. But it is a SHOULD NOT (both here and in RFC 2822).
>5) existing sites have restrictions on the total length of known
>headers, even when folded
Then they are broken.
>6) Newsgroup names with components starting with _ or + are in use,
>contrary to the draft
Then they are broken. They may linger for a while. The important thing is
to prevent any more of them.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk 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