[NNTP] Article number wording

[Matthias Andree]

On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, Ade Lovett wrote:

> > Message-ID is used to reference articles, not to access them in the
> > first place.
> 
> Huh?  ARTICLE|HEAD|BODY|STAT <msgid> must be a figment of my imagination
> then.

They are part of the protocol and I'd say an indispensable one, but not
in wide use by clients as their primary access method. The primary
access method is GROUP <name> then XOVER or similar, then
{ARTICLE|HEAD|BODY|STAT} <number>.

> We are hurting implementors considerably more by not releasing the
> document for publication with this eleventh-hour discussion.  That is
> not to say that this discussion is in any way invalid, but having read
> the entire thread, it seems very unlikely that any kind of consensus is
> going to be reached quickly.  Taking one point from the above, I would
> have to completely disagree on the use of MUST.  At most, it whould be a
> SHOULD.

Then we can just as well release the document without semantic change,
just spell out "2^31 - 1" in addition to that 10-digit number, and leave
the 2^31..2^64-1 issue for NNTP 2 revision 1 or NNTP 3.

I don't mind personally, I am not reading groups that might approach
that limit soon, and I haven't yet heard of leafnode user concerns in
this regard.

-- 
Matthias Andree