Re: ietf-nntp New wording on article numbers

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

Tom Limoncelli wrote:
>
>If there are no articles in a newsgroup, the counters
>should not be reset to zero.
>
>What about the newsgroup with one announcement per week?  On week #1,
>the article is "1".  I read it and my .newsrc contains "groupname: 1".
>Then that expires 4-5 days later.  On day 6 the counter is reset to 0.
>Now a new post (week #2) comes in and is assigned article number "1".
>My newsreader won't see that article.
>
>I think this is an optimization that we don't need.  If INN does
>this (as some have reported) then the code should be removed.

I think (hope!) this is a simple misunderstanding. The numbers assigned to
new articles must be monotonically increasing (ignoring the discussion of
how to handle article numbers overflowing 32-bit integers). The zeroes only
arise in the response to a GROUP command when the group is empty. In that 
situation, the count is returned as zero and some implementations (INN, and
apparently also the NNTP reference implementation) return zero as the low and
high article numbers - presumably on the grounds they are irrelevant since 
there are no articles, and zero is simply used because some value must be 
provided and zero makes it clear they are dummies.

If any implementations reset the numbering for new articles if a group ever
becomes empty, (a) they're broken and (b) any clients that rely on article
number rather than message ID are likely to get seriously confused (or conclude
that somethings gone seriously wrong and e.g. treat all articles as unread).

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