ietf-nntp Issue: empty groups

[Brian Kantor]

>Suppose that a group contained articles 222 to 234. Thus the response to
>GROUP would be first=222, last=234, count=13. Now suppose that all the
>articles are expired, making the group empty. What can GROUP now legally
>return ?

Local-disk-based news systems would have returned last=234, first=235,
count=-1 (which, being less than zero, would have been treated as zero
by the readers.).  That is because the expire process would have
updated the low article count as the articles were expired.
[NB: cancellations didn't update that number.]

Early NNTP did the same, since it simply reported the information from
the 'active' file.  INN changed that, since its expire didn't update
the low count.  I have come to believe that is a design error.  (It
seemed harmless at the time.)  Later "reference" NNTP does a directory
search and reports (as a special case) f=l=c=0 if no articles are found.

>[We all agree, I hope, that the next article to arrive would be
>235, setting the reply to first=last=235, count=1.]

yes.
	- Brian