[NNTP] Article Numbers Becoming Invalid (RFC 3977)

[Charles Lindsey]

In <873a2llop9.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>The news client is allowed to assume that no articles below the reported
>low water mark will ever reappear, which is semantically equivalent to
>saying that the low water mark will never decrease if the low water mark
>is actually meaningful.  The harm (clients thinking articles no longer
>exist on the server that actually do) doesn't apply in this situation
>since the inconsistency would be due to the LIST ACTIVE command lagging,
>and those articles wouldn't actually be accessible.

OK, so if on some distributed implementation the "official" active list
lags behind the truth, nobody is going to suffer any consequences, so long
as the "truth" eventually prevails (i.e. no articles in the disputed
region ever actually get reinstated). So any errata or advice we might
issue should be in the direction of allowing that state of affairs to
remain. Not that I am suggesting any erratum needs to be issued at this
point in time.

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