Re: Case-sensitivity in newsgroup names and message-IDs

[Russ Allbery <rra@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> USEFOR makes it clear that all newsgroups names SHOULD be in LC, but
> recognizes that some existing ones might have UC in them, in which
> case offering to NNTP (or to whatever else) exactly what the
> 'official' name of the group is (as it appears in a checkgroups, if
> you are lucky enough to be in a hierarchy that publishes those) is
> likely to succeed (mostly). But USEFOR makes it clear that all _new_
> groups MUST be LC throughout.
>
> So the only thing you are entitled to "expect" is that if you offfer
> LC names in order to retrieve LC groups, then that will _always_ work.
> Anything else is problematical, so don't do it.

The problem is, we don't actually say this anywhere that I can see, and
historically several NNTP documents have claimed that newsgroup names
are case-insensitive.  The current NNTP standard says:

   Keywords are case insensitive; the case of keywords for commands MUST
   be ignored by the server.  Command and response arguments are case or
   language specific only when stated, either in this document or in
   other relevant specifications.

which means in the absence of some specific statement to the contrary,
newsgroup names are case-insensitive.  However, in practice, I thought
they were always case-sensitive.  However, I've not done a survey of
what news software does outside of INN.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@xxxxxxxxxxxx)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>