ietf-nntp New wording on article numbers

[Jon Ribbens]

USENET news manager wrote:
> with (incomplete, see further comments below)
> 
>     If no articles are available in the group, the estimated count SHOULD be
>     zero. In that case, the first and last article numbers MUST either 
>     both be zero, or ...
> 
> where the right text for "..." is not entirely clear since I'm not sure what
> servers other than INN do. 

I don't think the above will work, because the estimated count being
zero is the only way of detecting that the group is empty, by
the sounds of it. I would prefer:

    If no articles are available in the group, the estimated count MUST be
    zero. In addition, the first and last article numbers MUST either be
    equal, or the first article number must be greater than the last article
    number. If articles are available in the group, the estimated count MUST
    NOT be zero, and SHOULD equal the number of articles available.

with perhaps a note saying which of the options is preferred for people
writing new servers (I would prefer first>last, as I said before).

> If so, it would be beneficial to document that. Clients could then use the
> high article number (if non-zero) to tidy .newsrc (marking all articles up to
> and including it as read, for example, reducing a possibly-long list of read
> articles to a single range).

This is not necessary. If the group is empty, the client may mark
all articles between 1 and the highest article number it has seen
previously as unavailable, no matter what the first and last
article numbers in the GROUP response are.

Cheers


Jon
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