ietf-nntp Re: Supersedes/Replaces in our present draft

Clive D.W. Feather clive at demon.net
Tue Nov 10 11:40:56 PST 1998


Charles Lindsey said:
> But it
> would be nice to have the "order of arrival" wording removed from the NNTP
> document. And it would help if people could point out specific newsreaders
> (if any) which would suffer.

In late 1996 Demon was running a proprietary news server that included a
feature known as "backfill", where articles were not numbered in order of
arrival. We had a *lot* of complaints from our customers who were missing
those articles that arrived after they had collected higher numbered
articles. I went to the IETF meeting at San Jose and raised this as an
issue. Other people said that their servers also did backfill, and they
also got complaints.

After some discussion the working group agreed to forbid backfill and I
volunteered to rewrite the relevant bits of the draft (the introduction to
numbering and the commands that walk a group).

This wording is in there because the WG consensus was that it was needed.
I'd be unhappy about proposals to change that without rediscussing the
problems.

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather       | Work: <clive at linx.org>   | Tel: +44 1733 705000
Regulation Officer       |   or: <clive at demon.net>  |  or: +44 973 377646
London Internet Exchange | Home: <clive at davros.org> | Fax: +44 1733 353929
(on secondment from Demon Internet)



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