David Newman writes:
As for FQDN, is there some reason we shouldn't use the definition from RFC 1594, section 5.2?
For the definition, yes, that's fine. But there's more to it if somebody needs to figure out how Mailman uses the term.
One issue is that we don't necessarily follow those definitions exactly, especially when validating. ISTR somebody got in trouble because they had a very unusual (but technically legal) character in an email address. It's a little risky to put implementation details like that in separate documentation rather than chanting "Use the Source, Luke", but on the other hand even if somebody knows where to find the source they may have difficulty reading a regular expression. And in this particular case, the regular expression used to parse the URL accepts almost anything (possibly including Chinese characters and emoji :-) in the FQDN.
Another thing we might want to put in such a glossary item would be under what circumstances we query DNS to check it's valid.
Doing that for *everything* would be a massive undertaking, of course, but it might be worth trying to add such items when we (core devs) get a question, rather than requiring people to search the archives to research it on their own. And for other contributors like you, if you remember having in issue with a term, eg, not recognizing its significance in an error message, you might add it to the glossary.
I'm not sure this is a great idea at all, just throwing things at the wall.
Steve