ietf-nntp Issue: empty groups

[Jack De Winter]

At 10:33 AM 12/31/96 -0600, Bob Sloane wrote:
>> (A) first=last=count=0. This is set by INN; my draft forbids it.
>
>This is what INN does, and what the ANU News server does. Is there
>some server somewhere that DOESN'T work this way?

There is SLNews, which is in beta, but should be released in second
quarter of 97.  I am just trying to figure which response type to use.
Currently, we do the first = last - 1, count = 0 approach as it
preserves the sense of the position within the newsgroup.  And to
be totally honest, I didn't want to add an extra line to set those
values to 0 if it was an empty group.

>Yes.  I would like to know some have some VERY good reason to make
>virtually all the news servers in the world non-compliant. Readers
>seem to be able to cope with current practice. What problem are you
>trying to solve here?

There was a following up list posting that basically said that
the case to use would be (B), but that there were other examples
of things in existance.  It specifically addressed the
first = last= count = 0 case as a case where first and last were to
be ignored.

My problem with including that case as anything other than depricated
is that it does not return any information about the position within
a group.  If I subscribe to a group and see 0 0 0, I would assume
that it was a new group.  I would want to know if articles had been
posted, and if there was a possibility to search for archived articles
at some other site.  That is my only problem with the 0 0 0 case, that
it loses the sense of position.

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.