🚀 go-pugleaf

Richard Clayton <richard@turnpike.com> uttered thus:
>In article <918728005.22074.6.nnrp-03.d4e48b20@news.demon.co.uk>,
>Alisdair Wren <alisdair@nospam.demon.co.uk> writes
>>Colin Price <Colin@frogmore6.demon.co.uk> uttered thus:
>>>Demon carry a far wider range of groups that Freeserve. I can't recall
>>>the exact figure, but I believe Demon carries over 30,000 groups.
>>Are we taking bets on how many news clients break when it hits 32768?
>Some programs broke at 16384 :(
>However, at 32768 Turnpike (all versions) will work :)  but I have seen
>reports that Agent has problems...  if anyone could give any detail
>(version numbers it is fixed at, that sort of thing) then this would be
>useful. Indeed any indications of problems with other newsreaders, and
>associated workarounds would be be useful for the Helpdesk (and indeed
>for peer-to-peer responses on Usenet).

It would probably be a reasonably trivial affair to set up a test server 
from which a list of 33000 groups could be obtained - that's something 
for the testers' list :-)[1]

As you can see, I'm using News XPress, but haven't so far challenged it. 

You may recall that I was writing my own client - it's there in spirit 
and can handle up to 1.2 million groups - but as yet hasn't any kind of 
GUI or any way to remember stuff from one execution to the other.

I was somewhat distracted along the line ;-)

>I was checking only yesterday whether it was time to post such a request
>to d.i.d (where I've crossposted and set followups) but had decided to
>leave it a few more weeks. However, since you've raised the subject we
>may as well discuss it now :-)

I'm glad it was of some use.

In theory, I would guess that an unsigned integer can handle 65535 
groups - I think problems only arise when the code uses a signed 
integer.  I suppose that there are other considerations such as how the 
list is indexed - if the reader is capable of storing more groups, but 
is only capable of 'seeing' the first 32767, then this might produce a 
rather more subtle absence of groups, rather than any kind of "Illegal 
operation".

Just my &#163;0.02's worth.

[1] I did attempt a subscription to this, but it seems to have been 
ignored.  Maybe I didn't follow the correct procedure.

-- 
Alisdair
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