[NNTP] 64-bit article counter extension strawman
Ken Murchison
ken at oceana.com
Sun Jul 17 17:44:42 PDT 2005
I gave some more thought to this today and came up with the following:
- Servers which support 64-bit (large) article counters advertise a
capability such as 'LARGEGROUP' (or some better named capability).
- If a group has exceeded the 32-bit article count, and the server
supports the extension, then it uses a new 212 response code to
GROUP/LISTGROUP which tells the client that the response may contain
64-bit numbers.
- Similarly, a new 216 response code is used for LIST ACTIVE if any of
the requested groups has exceeded the 32-bit article count.
- Clients which don't support this extension will not understand the new
response codes and *should* fail elegantly.
As an alternative:
- Servers which support 64-bit (large) article counters advertise a
capability such as 'LARGEGROUP' (or some better named capability).
- Servers always hide (411 response for [LIST]GROUP, ommission from LIST
ACTIVE response) groups which have exceeded the 32-bit article count
from clients until the client tells the server that it can support such
groups.
- A client tells the server that it supports large groups by using the
new keyword 'LARGEGROUP' as an argument to the CAPABILITY command.
- The server can then use the existing response codes for the
[LIST]GROUP and LIST ACTIVE commands.
--
Kenneth Murchison Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer 21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26 Orchard Park, NY 14127
--PGP Public Key-- http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp
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