ietf-nntp New wording on article numbers - draft 3

[Jack De Winter]

At 06:56 PM 1/10/97 +0200, Alan Barrett wrote:
>"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.

Well, not necessarily.  The arrival timestamp is a matter of processing.
There are two scenarios:
1) write directly to the article files: in this case, for each group
   that you are writing the article to, in a protected block, you
   generate the timestamp and ask for the next article number.  You
   then receive the file, and apply the same process for any other
   groups you need to copy to.
2) writing to intermediate file: same thing as one, but almost all
   of the copy case.

You should be generating the timestamp and the article number in a
protected manner anyways.

Or is it that you are talking about a situation where one system is
essentially mirroring (exactly, not just getting a feed) another
system?  If it is the mirroring case, perhaps it is the exception
to the rule and should be documented as such.  My problem with that
is having a good mechanism for that.

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.