Re: Case-sensitivity in newsgroup names and message-IDs

"Charles Lindsey" <[email protected]> Mon, 8 Jun 2009 11:24:14 GMT
Newsgroups gmane.ietf.usenet.format
Message-ID <[email protected]>
In <760366CC8D864B7AB7BBC365A2AD8BEA@Iulius> =?ISO-8859-15?Q?Julien_=C9LIE?= <[email protected]> writes:

>Besides, I read in RFC 5536 (USEFOR):


>   NOTE:  All-digit <component>s conflict with one widely used storage
>   scheme for articles.  Mixed-case groups cause confusion between
>   systems with case-sensitive matching and systems with case-
>   insensitive matching of <newsgroup-name>s.


>It does not say pretty well what is the expected behaviour!  For
>message-IDs, only <id-right>s are dealt with.  What for <id-left>?!?
>(In RFC 5322?  but I did not find it clearly.)
>And nothing explicitly states that newsgroups are case-sensitive...

That is because various systems treat them in various ways :-( .

USEFOR makes it clear that all newsgroups names SHOULD be in LC, but
recognizes that some existing ones might have UC in them, in which case
offering to NNTP (or to whatever else) exactly what the 'official' name of
the group is (as it appears in a checkgroups, if you are lucky enough to
be in a hierarchy that publishes those) is likely to succeed (mostly). But
USEFOR makes it clear that all _new_ groups MUST be LC throughout.

So the only thing you are entitled to "expect" is that if you offfer LC
names in order to retrieve LC groups, then that will _always_ work.
Anything else is problematical, so don't do it.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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