tradspool tooken weirdness

[Julien ÉLIE]

Hi Christoph,
> Heh, was thinking about 64bit article numbers as well ...
> 
> Major concern is "Is this really needed?". The highest article number I
> have here has seven digits (in control.cancel, no surprise), and the
> last number reset was at least 25 years ago. So hitting the 32 bit limit
> is not going to happen any time soon.

Some users speak about it from time to time.  Binary newsgroups are 
certainly the most likely ones to hit the current 2^31 limit first.



> Related, has anybody already tested whether clients can handle >32bit
> article numbers? I fear the worst ...

Last time I tested it, Thunderbird did not handle that.  It just hung 
upon receiving a large article number.
Some news readers like tin, slrn and flnews are reported to handle them.

FWIW, the idea would be not to return large article numbers unless the 
news client confirms it can handle them.  We discussed a MAXARTNUM 
capability to achieve that in December 2022 in news.software.nntp:

   <tnqm14$35bas$1 at news.trigofacile.com>
   https://groups.google.com/g/news.software.nntp/c/4_KjHu9GlBg

I've still not taken the time to properly submit an Internet-Draft, but 
is on my todo list.  I can re-prioritize it if need be.



> On the other hand, there's the main lesson from y2k and upcoming
> y2038: Software will be used for way longer times and at way bigger
> scale than initially anticipated - therefore adapt early.

As you're speaking about y2038, there's an open bug to support the 
upcoming 64-bit time_t transition for 32-bit archs that some 
distributions plan to do:
   https://github.com/InterNetNews/inn/issues/292
   https://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/64bit-time

The CAF file header should be converted to use uint64_t instead of 
time_t (as well as size_t and off_t).  Otherwise 32-bit system upgraded 
to 64-bit time_t won't be able to retrieve old articles from a timecaf 
news spool.

-- 
Julien ÉLIE

« L'amour, c'est comme les maths : ça commence par un Bézout et ça finit
   par un Gauß. »