[nos-bbs] case sensitivity of MID/BID - discussion needed

[Maiko Langelaar]

Recently I received an email from a JNOS user, and he brings up a very
interesting point. Some of you may have already read up about this on
the BPQ32 Yahoo group.

Why am I bringing this up ? Apparently the issue cause multiple copies
of the same message to appear at people's systems. I suppose one could
look at the expression, 'better 2 then none', but anyways ...

> I'm no expert on BBSs, but it seems to me the root problem is that BPQ
> is making case-sensitive comparisons of MIDs/BIDs and when the other
> major BBSs (JNOS, TNOS and apparently FBB) evidently don't care about
> case.

Putting in my 2 cents worth, JNOS (and TNOS too) may very well be sending
out lower case bids for non FBB forwarding session. Other then that, JNOS
and TNOS both use uppercase for FBB proposals (automatically uppercase
any bid values). As for comparison, JNOS and TNOS use strcasecmp, so the
case is actually ignored when 'we' do it. We don't care about case.

> After all, if you make the change to always force upper case, then BPQ
> still has a problem if an originating BBS uses lower case.  So either
> everyone needs to be either case-sensitive or case-insensitive. Right?

I don't want this to be a BPQ vs 'the rest of them' issue.

>From my perspective, I can try and ensure that NOS is 'consistent' with
keeping it uppercase (for starters). But the logistics of asking ALL of
the NOS users out there to patch just this one issue is raised. We could
probably eliminate the majority of these issues by telling people to just
stop using mbox fbb 0 (non fbb forward modes), not sure how well that will
be received by sysops. Perhaps that will force them to understand why
they are not able to get mbox fbb 1 or higher to work properly ?

Even if the consensus is to agree to case sensitivity, we still need to
get the systems out there updated. What a mess this might be.

So, let's talk about it ... the BPQ guys are, so perhaps we should too :)

Maybe after this discussion, then we could get the 3 or 4 maintainers
or authors to have an internal email talk about the results ? Or am I
being naive (even after all these years of doing this) ???

Maiko