davec (02/20/83)
For people who are tired of news arbitrarily chopping off part of their system name, or people otherwise interested, I've posted to net.sources the necessary changes to news2.9 to implement longer system names. It still isn't perfect (there's still a limit of 32 characters), but that's a lot better than 8. From what I've heard, version 2.10 of news will also support longer system names, so this problem should start to go away. Dave Clemans Tektronix
mark (02/21/83)
One word of caution about allowing longer host names. There is no problem with a return mailing address or path having a name longer than 8 characters in it. In fact, it was silly to truncate them to 8 in the first place, but it was done in order to assure that article ID's, which looked like sysname.##### would fit in 14 characters. It is important to insure that the article ID's you generate are no longer than 14 chars long, because some systems (notably A news) use them as file names to store the article in. Message ID's, which replace article ID's, won't have this restriction. But if you do install the long name code posted to net.sources, please make sure that you also fix the routine that generates article ID's (genident, I think) to truncate at 8.