[NNTP] Article references

[Russ Allbery]

Ken Murchison <ken at oceana.com> writes:
> Clive D.W. Feather wrote:

>> I propose modifying section 6 as follows:

>>    News reading clients have available a variety of mechanisms to
>>    retrieve articles via NNTP.  The news articles are stored and indexed
>>    using three types of keys.  One key is the message-id of an article.
>>    Another key is composed of the newsgroup name and the article number
>>    within that newsgroup.  That key MUST be unique to a particular
>>    server (there will be only one article with that number within a
>>    particular newsgroup), but is not required to be globally unique.
>>    Additionally, because the same article can be cross-posted to
>>    multiple newsgroups, there may be multiple keys that point to the
>> -  same article on the same server.  The final key is the arrival
>> +  same article on the same server; however, these keys MUST each refer
>> +  to a different newsgroup.  The final key is the arrival
>>    timestamp, giving the time that the article arrived at the server.

>> Any objections?

> I'm fine with this.  Or should we say that only one article with a given
> message-id can appear in any newsgroup?

I assume you mean article number?  I think that's what this says, although
somewhat by implication.

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