Re: ietf-nntp Issue: empty groups

[Jack De Winter <[e-mail]>]

>>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!

What I am trying to say though, is that it wasn't defined in the spec,
so the implementors decided to do something that appealed to them.  I
do not want to get into a holy war about which of them were right and
wrong, but I do want to see an explanation for that section that makes
sense.  To me, first=last=count=0 only makes sense if there never have
been any articles in that group.

regards,
Jack
-------------------------------------------------
Jack De Winter - Wildbear Consulting, Inc.
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Author of SLMail(95/NT) (http://www.seattlelab.com/) and other great products.