ietf-nntp New wording on article numbers

[Jack De Winter]

At 11:42 PM 12/27/96 -0800, Chris Caputo wrote:
>On Fri, 27 Dec 1996, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
>>     Each article has three relevant properties:
>[...]
>>       - An arrival timestamp, giving the time it arrived at the server.
>[...]
>
>I suggest that the concept of an arrival timestamp be replaced with
>something that says the server is responsible for article ordering, with
>the recommendation being that articles are ordered in the order they are
>received.  Since the arrival timestamp is not exposed, we should not
>require that server authors handle this issue in a specific way.

Hmm... I was wondering if we could adopt a set of semantics similar
to the 821bis and 822bis discussions.  There it was decided that the
Date header was the time that the user submitted the message to the
system.  Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing a header that states the
time it was originally inserted into the news system, say 'Posting-Date',
and what time it is posted on my local system, say 'Receive-Date' (or
some better name).  I would like to see something that may tell me
how old an article is, and if so, why it took so long.  Now I know
SMTP style received headers are probably out of the question, but
having some minimal dates like that would help out.

>If Usenet (as an example ;-) continues to grow as it has, we may eat this
>space pretty quickly in which case we either need to expand the range to
>64 bits and/or precisely define how to handle rollovers.  I'd love to see
>us do both, but I don't think I have much support in that department.  Or
>do I? 

I can see this too, but not for the immediate future.  I think that we
can deal with the present, and worry about that in about 5 years. ;-)

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.