ietf-nntp New wording on article numbers

[Jack De Winter]

At 02:49 PM 12/27/96 -0800, jeff at taltos.com wrote:
>In reviewing Clive's proposed wording changes concerning article
>numbering:
>
>First, this wording is good in that, at a specific point in time,
>the last (high) article number might not be valid, and this is the
>"correct" behavior (if an article came in, and then was expired, then
>the server should be able to give the "high" article number even though
>that "high" article number is no longer valid).
>
>However, a question: For the NNTP server that I wrote, I save three
>items of interest after a successful GROUP command: the group object
>(internal, but useful for me), the low article number AT THE TIME OF
>THE GROUP COMMAND, and the high article number AT THE TIME OF THE
>GROUP COMMAND.  By saving this, I can guarentee consistent behavior
>for commands like LAST, NEXT, and ARTICLE commands (if the "current"
>article number would go out of range of my saved values, then I will
>give an appropriate response code).
>
>Now, we can't require this (since it wasn't in the original spec, and
>since many servers today don't enforce this), but: shouldn't we recommend
>this behavior (so that, at least if recommendations are followed, NNTP
>behavior is nice and consistent across commands)?
>
>I reset the saved low/high numbers on each GROUP command.  Thus, if you
>wanted to check if new articles came in, you could either do a GROUP
>command or you could do a LIST command.  The GROUP command is more
>efficient (much less network traffic in response).
>
>Thoughts/comments?

While I personally think this is a good idea, that is only in
my implementation (and obviously yours).  Forcing these kinds
of implementation decisions on people leads to religious wars.
You might want to talk about optimizations, but that is about
as far as we should really go.

regards,
Jack
-------------------------------------------------
Jack De Winter - Wildbear Consulting, Inc.
(519) 576-3873		http://www.wildbear.on.ca/

Author of SLMail(95/NT) (http://www.seattlelab.com/) and other great products.