[NNTP] Thoughts on article number resetting/rollover

[Ken Murchison]

Andrew - Supernews wrote:

> Hard to coordinate this between independent, non-cooperating servers
> (see the outsource case above).

I wasn't trying to solve any inter-server problems.


>  Ken> A mechanism like this seems like a pretty trivial extension to
>  Ken> NNTP (one extra param in the GROUP, LISTGROUP, and LIST ACTIVE
>  Ken> responses)
> 
> You think you can alter those responses without breaking _every single
> client_ in existence?

I believe so, unless those clients are already broken.  We *should* be 
able to add extra arguments to these responses without breaking existing 
clients.  NNTP-BASE says: "The server MAY add any text after the 
response code or last argument as appropriate, and the client MUST NOT 
make decisions based on this text."  In fact, I was told that this is 
the exact reason why we couldn't add an auto-capabilities response to 
the "free text" area of a response.

Here's a potential strawman:

- Add a new UIDVALIDITY capability to the CAPABILTIES response, which 
tells clients that the GROUP/LISTGROUP and LIST ACTIVE responses contain 
UIDVALIDITY as an extra argument.

-Extend GROUP/LISTGROUP response:
211 number low high group uidvalidity

- Extend LIST ACTIVE response:
215 list follows:
group high low status uidvalidity
...


Clients that don't support the UIDVALIDITY extension, *should* ignore 
the extra arguments (not sure about the LIST ACTIVE multi-line response 
though).


-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     2495 Main St. - Suite 401
716-604-0088 x26      Buffalo, NY 14214
--PGP Public Key--    http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp