From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!eagle!mhuxt!mhuxa!mhb5c!mhb5b!cbosgd!mark
Newsgroups: net.news
Title: Re: Long system names
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.3152
Posted: Mon Feb 21 13:34:31 1983
Received: Wed Feb 23 04:41:27 1983
References: <979@tektronix.UUCP>

One word of caution about allowing longer host names.

There is no problem with a return mailing address or path
having a name longer than 8 characters in it.  In fact, it
was silly to truncate them to 8 in the first place, but it
was done in order to assure that article ID's, which looked like
	sysname.#####
would fit in 14 characters.  It is important to insure that the
article ID's you generate are no longer than 14 chars long, because
some systems (notably A news) use them as file names to store the
article in.  Message ID's, which replace article ID's, won't have
this restriction.  But if you do install the long name code posted
to net.sources, please make sure that you also fix the routine that
generates article ID's (genident, I think) to truncate at 8.