From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/12509 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Karl Kleinpaste Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Re: groups with numeric name parts Date: 03 Oct 1997 21:27:29 -0400 Message-ID: References: <199710032025.VAA00767@cenderis.demon.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: coloc-standby.netfonds.no X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1035152032 4130 80.91.224.250 (20 Oct 2002 22:13:52 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2002 22:13:52 +0000 (UTC) Keywords: number message send rfc1036 newsgroup names Return-Path: Original-Received: from xemacs.org (xemacs.cs.uiuc.edu [128.174.252.16]) by altair.xemacs.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id TAA16732 for ; Fri, 3 Oct 1997 19:31:57 -0700 Original-Received: from ifi.uio.no (0@ifi.uio.no [129.240.64.2]) by xemacs.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id VAA15567 for ; Fri, 3 Oct 1997 21:24:51 -0500 (CDT) Original-Received: from claymore.vcinet.com (claymore.vcinet.com [208.205.12.23]) by ifi.uio.no with SMTP (8.6.11/ifi2.4) id for ; Sat, 4 Oct 1997 03:31:10 +0200 Original-Received: (qmail 31472 invoked by uid 504); 4 Oct 1997 01:31:09 -0000 Original-Received: (qmail 31469 invoked from network); 4 Oct 1997 01:31:08 -0000 Original-Received: from pocari-sweat.jprc.com (207.86.147.217) by claymore.vcinet.com with SMTP; 4 Oct 1997 01:31:08 -0000 Original-Received: (from karl@localhost) by pocari-sweat.jprc.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id VAA01385; Fri, 3 Oct 1997 21:27:29 -0400 Original-To: "(ding)" X-Face: "5(T0tZd{6}pd~YzBG8O/*EW,.]6]@`m^e;fv65W^Y&=d"M\1H}>T~4_.kcDD.O~y3k)a6h R;Nmi>9|>Nm${2IpM0^RcUEa\jcq?KOP)C&~x51l~zCHTulL^_T|u0I^kB'z@]{`2YjQu In-Reply-To: Stainless Steel Rat's message of "03 Oct 1997 18:21:45 -0400" Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:12509 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:12509 Stainless Steel Rat writes: > Early Arpanet/Internet standards describe how to do something, not how not > to do something. rfc1036 reserves numerics for articles, therefore they > should not be used for other things. Call me crazy, but you seem to have a distinctly peculiar incantation of RFC1036. In mine: [1008] [20:39:11] pocari-sweat:rfc> grep -in numer rfc1036.txt [1009] [20:39:17] pocari-sweat:rfc> grep -in numbe rfc1036.txt 288: sequence number for messages submitted to the network, or a short 485: reasonable number of backwards references. 578: This contains a count of the number of lines in the body of the 585: names and message numbers. These are the newsgroups listed in the 586: "Newsgroups" line and the corresponding message numbers from the 603: the "Xref" line shows that the message is message number 461 in the 604: newsgroup news.lists, and message number 6378 in the newsgroup 929: Since news messages are usually short, and since a large number of 943: followed by a message containing the given number of bytes. (The [1010] [20:39:24] pocari-sweat:rfc> grep -in reser rfc1036.txt [1011] [20:39:30] pocari-sweat:rfc> Odd, no references to "reservations," or "numerics," anywhere. In the copy I've got, anyway -- maybe yours is different. These "number" items in RFC1036 refer to... 288: message-id 485: references inclusion count 578: lines header 585/586: xref header 603/604: example of xref 929/943: batching Roughly translated, RFC1036 doesn't have the faintest idea about proper choice of newsgroup names. It helps if one first reads RFCs, before commenting upon them. While I'm in an RFCoid rant, "early arpanet/internet standards" were _/perfectly/_ happy to bitch and moan about an arbitrarily large set of things that ought _not_ to be done. How many dozen examples shall I pull out, if you feel the point needs to be made explicitly? Let's start with the basics: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." (First explicit reference: RFC1043, merely making express note of a theme that had already been in place for years.) Now start defining the concept of "conservative" and what it means one should _not_ do. See RFCs 1122/1123 for the whole MUST/MAY/MAY NOT/MUST NOT continuum; less than 2 years separates 1036 and 1123. Theorem: Usenet systems send (have always sent; have always been able to send) newsgroup names containing leading digits, and in fact have always coped reasonably well with non-top-level name components consisting entirely of digits (viz. alt.2600). Proof: Left as an archival exercise to those readers who weren't actually around in the days of A News. (Yes, I was.) Given that netnews systems send such names (either in NNTP, or [as they always have] by reading local active file and spool), all newsreaders had damn well better be prepared to accept them liberally. --karl