ietf-nntp Requirement for timeout close unclear

Charles Lindsey chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk
Fri Jul 6 05:00:52 PDT 2001


In <yl4rsq3nix.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>    The client SHOULD NOT assume that the article has been successfully
>    transferred unless it receives an affirmative response from the
>    server.  Since, however, the affirmative response may have been sent
>    and lost, the client SHOULD use the same message-id in the article
>    when resending it or check whether the article was successfully
>    posted before resending it to ensure that the resend will not result
>    in a duplicate article.

The problem there is that in some systems (notably CNews) a POST command
does not immediately make that article available to be retrieved by an
ARTICLE command (it just gets queued, and the queue is processed
periodically by a cron job). There is another place in the draft (can't
remember exactly where) where we have had to make allowance for that sort
of behaviour.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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