[NNTP] Article references

[Ken Murchison]

Russ Allbery wrote:

> 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.

No, I don't think I was clear.  My assumption is that we should never 
have a duplicate message-id in a single newsgroup.  The text says that 
message-id is one key and article_number+timestamp is another key, but 
it seems to me that the only real key is message-id.  Article number is 
really just a mapping IMO, but this is a different can of worms.

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
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