Re: ietf-nntp Issue: empty groups

[USENET news manager <[e-mail]>]

Jack De Winter wrote:
>
>>>Here's the possibilities.
>>>
>>>(A) first=last=count=0. This is set by INN; my draft forbids it.
>>
>>Also done, we've been told, by the current NNTP reference implementation...
>
>I was just going over this again and I just remember a point I
>should have made.
>
>first = last = count = 0 does not say anything to me about our
>current situation.  It says that there never has been, and that
>there currently is, no articles in that group.  I think this is
>the main reason that there may be problems with this.

It *could* have been defined to mean that, but that's not the meaning given
to it by the majority of current server, and it's not what clients accessing
the spool and control files directly would see (with INN, and with C-news
when I last used it), since the values they use in the "active" file are 1
for low article and 0 for high article. If zero were a valid article number,
first=last=count=0 would be self-contradictory since it would be saying
article zero was (the only one) present, but that there were no articles!

                                John Line
-- 
Cambridge University Computing Service - USENET news manager. Usually John Line
[e-mail]    (alias {newsmaster,news,usenet}@news.cam.ac.uk)