[NNTP] Thoughts on article number resetting/rollover

[Russ Allbery]

Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:
> Ken Murchison said:

>> - 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.

I haven't actually checked, but I'm pretty sure at least some clients will
treat the uidvalidity as part of the status flag.  Others will probably
cope.  I'm not sure if any will treat the line as malformed, but it's
possible.

BTW, while I know that the standard requires that the server be able to
add arbitrary text after positional parameters in replies, I would be
leery of relying too heavily on that requirement for widely used replies
with positional parameters.  I know it's supposed to work, but we haven't
had a complete formal standard in a long time and clients written against
existing practice by experimentation likely won't handle that properly.

> 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.

Which means that clients not supporting this extension will lose
information about whether the group is moderated.

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