[NNTP] Thoughts on article number resetting/rollover

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Ken Murchison said:
> 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

<FX: blinks>

That would work. It breaks, or at least seriously bends, the paradigm of
"responses have a fixed number of arguments", but it's completely backwards
compatible.

[The name needs changing, of course.]

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

I'm much less sure about this, though. I don't know what clients will do if
there's an extra field.

On the other hand, if you made the status be "yu=1234", "nu=1234", or
"mu=1234", where 1234 is the uidvalidity value, this would conform to the
existing spec:

    Other values for the
    status may exist; the definition of these other values and the
    circumstances under which they are returned may be specified in an
    extension or may be private to the server.  A client SHOULD treat an
    unrecognized status as giving no information.

Something akin to this would provide a good basis for a extension for
"group reset", complementary to BIGNUM.

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