Support binary articles

[eagle]

INN currently will not accept messages that contain embedded nul characters. NNTP currently does not support raw binary articles, due primarily to the requirement that all articles end in \r\n.\r\n with the first \r\n considered to be part of the article and not part of the terminator.

Supporting binary articles would allow much more efficient transmission of some data types. The path would be through an NNTP extension. Clive Feather's suggestion is:

• ARTICLE etc. have an extra parameter BINARY saying that binary is understood, combined with new responses (260/261/262) where the length comes before any other parameter

• POST, IHAVE etc. have an extra parameter BINARY saying that they want to send a binary article, combined with new responses (360/365) to say that a binary article may be sent.

(All the binary responses have 6 as the second digit instead of what it would have been. Alternatively the last digit could be fiddled with.)

[Julien ÉLIE]

Not a compliance with standards, strictly speaking. But it may be in the future. That's why I mark this ticket as related to NNTP compliance.