[NNTP] 64-bit article counter extension strawman

[Charles Lindsey]

In <42DBEF3A.7050305 at nntpserver.com> Steve Walker <nntp at nntpserver.com> writes:

>Russ Allbery wrote:

>> Do we want to allow rolling over?  Rolling over comes with its own set of
>> bugs, in particular triggering the low > high logic that causes many

>I think rolling over is prone to problems and it's not worth it 
>when there is there is a good clean method of using 64 bit numbers.

And I think exactly the opposite. It is ridiculous using huge numbers
(approaching 64 bits) to identify articles in a group where the maximum
number of articles actually existing at any one time is unlikely to exceed
100,000, and probably nowhere near that.

So we should look at wrap-around solutions (several variants have been
mentioned). What are the problems? Special meanings for zero, and several
ways of detecting whether a group is empty. Is that it?

If that is so, then we should be exploring whichever wrap-around scheme
will cause least disruption to introduce. For example, would reducing the
number of ways to indicate an empty group help? If so, then you say that
method X is deprecated, _and_will_be_removed_in_a_future_standard_. We are
in no hurry to solve this problem (we have at least 10 years), and so all
we need is to devise a scheme that could safely be standardized in 10
years time, provided we give notice of intention NOW.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl at clerew.man.ac.uk      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5