ietf-nntp Requirement for timeout close unclear

[Russ Allbery]

Charles Lindsey <chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
> 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.

So the client may have to take that into account if it can't reuse the
message ID.  I don't see that as much of a problem; basically, it just
says "don't retry right away in the rare case where you didn't get an
affirmative response from the server unless you can generate your own
message IDs."

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