ietf-nntp Zero-argument ARTICLE and missing articles

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Russ Allbery said:
> What is the behavior of the zero-argument form of ARTICLE (and HEAD, BODY,
> and STAT for that matter) supposed to be if the current article pointer is
> pointing to an article that doesn't exist (such as an article that's been
> cancelled since the group was entered)?
[...]
> This seems to indicate that the correct thing to do in this case is to
> return a 423 error response.

Right.

> This isn't, however, what INN does; since
> version 1.0, INN has always instead started to advance the current article
> pointer if the current article didn't exist, continuing until it found a
> valid article (which it would then return) or until the current article
> pointer reached the high water mark.

We must have wanted to forbid that behaviour, given the wording used.

> I don't know if any reader could be relying on INN's behavior and be
> unable to handle a 423 response to a zero-argument ARTICLE command.

What does INN return if the pointer reaches the HWM ? Presumably 423. So
the client needs to handle that case anyway.

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