🚀 go-pugleaf

In the referenced article, bob@tinman.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) writes:
>
>RFC1036 "Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages" says nothing
>about the case of the letters in a newsgroup name.  However, RFC977
>"Network News Transfer Protocol" has a couple of comments.
>
> Section 2.3 (Commands) says: "Commands and command parameters are not
> case sensitive. That is, a command or parameter word may be upper
> case, lower case, or any mixture of upper and lower case."
>
> Section 3.2.1 (the describing the GROUP command) says: "Note that the
> name of the newsgroup is not case-dependent.  It must otherwise match
> a newsgroup obtained from the LIST command or an error will result."
>
>This would seem to indicate that if a newsgroup already exists on the
>server machine with a mixed-case name, then you must specify it in
>GROUP the same as it came from LIST.  What's the ruling from the
>Talmudic scholars of news.software.nntp?  Is the existing NNTP
>software, or perhaps the existing inews, in violation of the RFCs?

While I've never been accused of being a rabbi, I think I can take a
crack at this.

Case sensitive newsgroup names are a bad idea, because not all
operating systems support case sensitive names and netnews is in use on
a lot of very different systems (and this is hardly an issue of
"modern" versus "ancient" software; there are some examples of "modern"
operating systems that are in popular use that are not case
sensitive).

We felt (and I think I can speak for Phil & Brian here) that there
should be no distinction between foo.bar and FOO.bar and foo.BAR and
fOo.BaR, so we put it that way in the spec. What this means for servers
on UNIX systems is that you never use a mixed-case newsgroup name.
So much for comp.sys.NeXT or comp.windows.NeWS.

	Erik E. Fair	apple!fair	fair@apple.com