ietf-nntp New wording on article numbers - draft 3

[Chris Hall]

In article <Pine.NEB.3.95.970110184548.1799t-100000 at apb.iafrica.com>,
Alan Barrett <apb at iafrica.com> writes
>"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.

Let me see if I understand this correctly.  Are you saying that a
collection of articles numbered, say, {12,13,14,15,16,17} at the master,
could arrive at the slave in, say, the order {13,15,12,17,14,16} ?  But
all earlier articles would arrive before this collection, and all later
would arrive after -- so the out of order arrival is localised ?

If so, could the slave not avoid exposing the out of order arrival ?
That is, could the slave avoid serving an article (or its number) until
all lower numbered articles have turned up ?  (Assuming you can
guarantee that the articles will turn up, even if you cannot guarantee
the order.)

>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.

Arghh !!!
-- 
Chris Hall                                       Chris.Hall at turnpike.com