[NNTP] Article Numbers Becoming Invalid (RFC 3977)

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Wed Dec 30 21:44:58 PST 2009


Sabahattin Gucukoglu <mail at sabahattin-gucukoglu.com> writes:

> But, and I hate to be a nuisance about this, my question is still not
> quite answered: if I cannot manipulate the article pointer while an
> invalid article number is the next to be fetched, how can I really use
> NEXT?

Unless the group is empty, the article number is guaranteed to be valid
when you enter a group with GROUP.  NEXT sets the article number to the
next valid article.  It will skip over any invalid article numbers for
you.  So if you do:

GROUP example.test
ARTICLE
NEXT
ARTICLE
NEXT
[...]

until you get a 421 error from NEXT, you will traverse every article in
the group.  You may still get a 420 error from ARTICLE if the currently
selected article disappears between NEXT and the ARTICLE command, but NEXT
should still work.  I don't believe NEXT can return 420 unless the group
was empty when the GROUP command was issued.

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


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