Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: C expire + B news
Message-ID: <1989Aug18.182458.26362@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <6703@cs.utexas.edu> <63816@uunet.UU.NET>
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 89 18:24:58 GMT

In article <63816@uunet.UU.NET> rick@uunet.UU.NET (Rick Adams) writes:
>B news does it because message-ids are supposed to be case insensitive
>when compared. The simplest way to do that with dbm is to map
>everything to lower case.
>
>How does cnews keep the case independance without a similar hack?

C News treats message-ids as case-sensitive.  The issue is tricky; Geoff,
who is our RFCologist, reports that the case of message-ids is not addressed
in RFC1036, so RFC822 dominates.  And RFC822 does *NOT* say that message-ids
are case-insensitive, Rick's comments notwithstanding.

The reason the issue is tricky is that RFC822 doesn't say that they are
case-sensitive either.  It's worse.  A message-id is .  The
"domain" part is case-INSENSITIVE.  The "stuff" part is case-SENSITIVE,
except that all variations of "postmaster", e.g. "PoSTmAsTeR", compare
equal.  Lordy.		

So B News is just as wrong as C News on this.  B2.10.1 and before treated
message-ids as case-sensitive, like C News.  B2.11 treats them as case-
insensitive.  Neither is right.

Perhaps we should implement the 822 rules, and be the first news system
to actually be correct.  We're a bit reluctant to do so, though.
We don't see that anything is gained by it.  News transmission, by any
route we know of, is not going to alter the case of message-ids.  (We
would be interested to hear any counterexamples.)  It seems to be an
unnecessary complication.
-- 
V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu