[NNTP] Large article numbers extension

[Charles Lindsey]

In <20050727130242.GO82632 at finch-staff-1.thus.net> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:

>Charles Lindsey said:

>> 2. Have a flag day.
>> 

>> Somehow it has to reset that line of its .newsrc file,

>This may be a software option if it isn't a text editing job.

>> at
>> which point it will be offered all the already-read articles in the group
>> as it they were new. Tedious, but manageable, and no articles are lost.

>The same is true with wraparound.

>> And with a bit of assistance from the server (for example, a list mapping
>> old numbers to new ones, or making the new numbers differ by a large
>> constant from the old ones, or keeping the old group around in a renamed
>> form, with Xref headers of old articles pointing to both groups) things
>> could be made almost tolerable.

>Also true with wrap-around. Indeed, it's probably easier, because you just
>mark the low half of the number space as unread.

Actually, what we are seeing is that there is little difference between a
wrap-around and an intelligently performed flag day.

Indeed, the essential difference is that a wrap-around is written into
some future extension of our standard, so that clients that understand the
extension can detect it and make adjustments to .newsrc files
automatically; whereas with a flag day the server has somehow to warn all
of its clients that they need to take some action (but posting some
articles to the group, to be distributed only locally to that server and
its clients, would be the way to achieve that).

Also, it seems clear that action should be taken well before the upper
limit is reached, and that wrapping around to something rather larger than
'1' would be sensible.

>However, in either situation, what if there isn't a .newsrc file you can
>edit? This appears to be the situation in Turnpike, for example. [I
>normally use it in Newnews mode, so I'm not completely familiar with this
>case.]

Surely, there must be some equivalent of the .newsrc file. OTOH if the
client is relying entirely on NEWNEWS, they it doesn't really care about
article numbers anyway.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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