Re: Processed: dpkg bug severities
Oliver Elphick <olly@lfix.co.uk> writes:
> This line produced an error when fetchmail downloaded my mail:
>
> Klee Dienes and Ian Jackson <dpkg-maint@chiark.greenend.org.uk>(dpkg #10049
> #10259 #1037 #10433 #104...992 #12187 #1399 #1555 #1797 #1921 #2701 #2894
> #2904 #2911 #2929 #3170 #3225 #3406 #3991 #4093 #4319... Unbalanced '('
> Klee Dienes and Ian Jackson <dpkg-maint@chiark.greenend.org.uk>(dpkg #10049
> #10259 #1037 #10433 #104...992 #12187 #1399 #1555 #1797 #1921 #2701 #2894
> #2904 #2911 #2929 #3170 #3225 #3406 #3991 #4093 #4319... Unbalanced '('
>
> which came (I think) from sendmail.
I have no idea whether it came from sendmail or not, but the brackets
_were_ balanced. The line in question is 625 characters wide, and the
last character is the closing ). A copy of the header as it got
through my mail-to-news gateway into chiark.mail.debian.devel is
below (I've run `fold -79' on it so you can see it even if your mailer
doesn't like long body lines either).
Perhaps your mailer has problems with long lines. Personally I think
this is just a bug in your mailer - 625 characters is not a totally
unreasonable size for a header line. However, I'll see if I can find
some time to have the bug system wrap the line itself a little
earlier.
> So it appears that Ian Jackson's mailer is producing header lines that cannot
> be parsed by a receiving sendmail.
It's not my `mailer', it's the bug system. That message was sent to
debian-devel because I reassigned a bug to `general', and the
maintainer for `general' is debian-devel.
RFC822 et al are
RFC822 s3.1.1 says:
Note: While the standard permits folding wherever linear-
white-space is permitted, it is recommended that struc-
tured fields, such as those containing addresses, limit
folding to higher-level syntactic breaks. For address
fields, it is recommended that such folding occur
between addresses, after the separating comma.
RFC821 s4.5.3 has some stuff about sizes of various things, but most
of these appear (as would be expected) only to apply to parts of the
SMTP, and not to the RFC822 message being transferred. It says
(emphasis theirs):
****************************************************
* *
* TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT POSSIBLE, IMPLEMENTATION *
* TECHNIQUES WHICH IMPOSE NO LIMITS ON THE LENGTH *
* OF THESE OBJECTS SHOULD BE USED. *
* *
****************************************************
and
text line
The maximum total length of a text line including the
<CRLF> is 1000 characters (but not counting the leading
dot duplicated for transparency).
RFC1123 doesn't mention header lines, but says about message
sizes in s5.3.8:
Mailer software MUST be able to send and receive messages of at
least 64K bytes in length (including header), and a much larger
maximum size is highly desirable.
DISCUSSION:
Although SMTP does not define the maximum size of a
message, many systems impose implementation limits.
The current de facto minimum limit in the Internet is 64K
bytes. However, electronic mail is used for a variety of
purposes that create much larger messages. For example,
mail is often used instead of FTP for transmitting ASCII
files, and in particular to transmit entire documents. As
a result, messages can be 1 megabyte or even larger. We
note that the present document together with its lower-
layer companion contains 0.5 megabytes.
So if I'm going to be standardslawyerly I have to come to the
conclusion that 625-character header lines are perfectly legal, but
that ones exceeding 998 text characters would violate a restriction in
RFC821.
Ian.
Cc: Guy Maor <maor@debian.org>(bash #10259 #10433 #10494),
debian-devel@lists.debian.org (general #4784),
Peter Tobias <tobias@et-inf.fho-emden.de>(netbase #4319),
Andy Mortimer <andy.mortimer@poboxes.com>(dpkg-mountable #9217),
Klee Dienes <klee@debian.org>(dpkg-ftp #11074 #4895 #5450 #7606 #7813 #8554),
Darren Stalder <torin@daft.com>(perl #4515),
debian-bugs-closed@lists.debian.org (#10049 #11073 #2894 #2929 #3225 #3406 #4
093 #4561 #4584 #4808 #4848 #4877 #4936 #5640 #5733 #6383 #6435 #6452 #6482 #67
36 #8893),
Klee Dienes and Ian Jackson <dpkg-maint@chiark.greenend.org.uk>(dpkg #10049 #
10259 #1037 #10433 #10452 #10494 #11047 #11073 #11074 #11228 #11341 #11868 #119
92 #12187 #1399 #1555 #1797 #1921 #2701 #2894 #2904 #2911 #2929 #3170 #3225 #34
06 #3991 #4093 #4319 #4448 #4449 #4451 #4474 #4515 #4584 #4588 #4784 #4808 #484
8 #4863 #4877 #4895 #4936 #4950 #4974 #5380 #5450 #5536 #5639 #5640 #5733 #5807
#5868 #5983 #6007 #6394 #6435 #6452 #6486 #6709 #6736 #6757 #6842 #6843 #7012
#7093 #7128 #7389 #7540 #7606 #7692 #7813 #7956 #8391 #8554 #8639 #8893 #9217 #
9355 #957 #9833, dpkg-dev #10091 #11246 #11385 #12505 #4561 #6383 #6482)
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