ietf-nntp New wording on article numbers - draft 3

[Chris Caputo]

On Fri, 10 Jan 1997, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
> Alan Barrett 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.
> This is backfill by another name. We agreed that backfill was to be
> forbidden, and the wording is written on that basis.

How about not specifying how servers communicate, in terms of article
ordering, but rather that the server must always present to the client an
increasing picture of the available article numbers?  If there are "holes" 
in the article numbers on a slave, it shouldn't show any article numbers
above the holes until the holes have been filled in. 

Regarding the other part of the draft, article range, I didn't sense we
actually had consensus.  Is there a consensus of people comfortable with
saying article numbers must fit in a 32 bit number?  I'm not.  I'd much
rather we put it up for discussion at the next IETF and leave the issue as
unsettled for now. 

Chris Caputo
President, Altopia Corporation