tradspool tooken weirdness

[Christoph Biedl]

Julien ÉLIE wrote...

> 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.

According to a message I received in private, some binary groups already
crossed that border some 15 years ago.

[ Clients and 64 bit article numbers ]
> 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

Will read the entire discussion later. Personally, this idea gives me a
bad feeling for introducing some complexity instead for just forcing the
clients to deal it with. But possibly this has already been voiced and
discussed.

> > 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.

Possibly this should indeed be done in a huge batch of fixing 32/64 bit
issues. However, while tempting, my schedule is pretty full, so don't
expect me to work on this any time soon, sorry.

    Christoph