[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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