ietf-nntp Section 9.1* - low article number, and article ordering

[Russ Allbery]

David Riley <David.Riley at software.com> writes:

> I think we should consider loosening some of these restrictions.  In
> large installations, news services are typically spread across multiple
> machines.  In order to do this, articles must be centrally numbered and
> then distributed to the leaf nodes (which might involve multiple hops).
> Using standard Usenet distribution techniques (multiple paths possible
> due to a mesh network, multiple streams, etc.), articles might arrive
> slightly out of order at the final reader site.

This is another long discussion that I highly recommend reading in the
archives.  I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong, but there were
also good reasons for making these restrictions and it was discussed at at
least one IETF meeting of this working group.

In any case, there's a whole bunch of discussion of the pluses and minuses
of each approach in the archives that ideally shouldn't need to be
rehashed.  Due to the way nearly all existing news reading clients are
implemented, allowing backfill (which most replication methods do
presently do) means that clients stand a fairly good risk of missing the
backfilled articles.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>