ietf-nntp Articles without message IDs

[Jeffrey M. Vinocur]

On Mon, 31 Mar 2003, Russ Allbery wrote:

> Please, everyone, read through this and say something about your opinion.

Sir!

My opinion is that I don't know.  However, some comments on the 
stick-with-977 alternative below.


>  1. Go with Clive's text, quoted below, which says that articles SHOULD
>     have message IDs but reserves <0> for places where the protocol has
>     to indicate a message ID for an article that doesn't have one.  State
>     that <0> is not a valid message ID (which immediately takes care of
>     making it invalid to offer such an article via IHAVE) and note that
>     such articles are not returned by NEWNEWS.

I'm suddenly curious if any implementation (client or server) does 
anything special with <0>, or if everyone just merrily assumes uniqueness 
for Message-IDs.

There are some funny implications for the restriction on IHAVE of such 
articles; for example, does that mean that a server pool can't transfer 
such articles internally -- or that it can't claim to be using NNTP if it 
does?  Seems crufty, and the more I think about it, the more I'd be happy 
to see <0> done away with.


-- 
Jeffrey M. Vinocur
jeff at litech.org