ietf-nntp New wording on article numbers - draft 3

[Alan Barrett]

"Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> said:
>     The server MUST ensure that article numbers are issued in order of
>     arrival timestamp; that is, later arriving articles MUST have higher
>     numbers than earlier arriving ones.

This effectively declares that feeds between master and slave news servers
(where the slaves want to use the same article numbers as the master) may
not use any parallelism.  (If several articles can be transferred in
parallel, then I believe that there's no way to guarantee that articles
will never arrive at the slave out of order).  I still maintain that
prohibiting such parallelism is an undue burden on implementations.

I could be satisfied if the spec explicitly catered for master/slave
configurations by saying that the master must assign article numbers in
order of arrival, but the slave may receive articles from the master out
of order and clients should be able to cope with that.

--apb (Alan Barrett)