🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <AD7302619668DDBE2@sw15.demon.co.uk>,
laurent@sw15.com (Laurent Humbert) wrote:

> In article <4if6q3$37g@monmouth.demon.co.uk>,
> sclarke@iee.org (Steven Clarke) wrote:
> 
> >* Don't use Free Agent or similar faulty news readers
> 
> Who are you anyway to officially decide like that what software is faulty
> or not ?

Indeed. If one is going to be pedantic to that degree about whether 
something is compliant with the RFC then one can argue with equal 
strength that both are faulty and in breach of the "Be conservative 
in what you send and liberal in what you accept" principle.

Dale Shuttleworth's point that it would be entirely RFC compliant to 
send the body text out reversed is well taken.

> >and clients have been developed. In UNIX clients (which formed the
> >vast majority in the early years), in became standard practice to
> >keep a list of all the article that had already been seen to be
> >listed in a file ~/.newsrc . This contained lists of articles in
> >comma and hyphenated form eg.
> >
> >demon.service: 1-1277,1279-1281,1284-1290

As I understand it a .newsrc file does not keep track of articles 
seen, rather of articles that have been *read*. It does have the happy 
effect of coping well with the behaviour news is exhibiting 
occasionally but I doubt this was a design intention. In the example 
given, what happens to articles below 1277 that reappear? There's 
nothing in the RFC to say that news can't reply:

211 100 300 400 demon.service

to a GROUP demon.service query one day and 

211 200 250 450 demon.service

the next. It's as legitimate as the current behaviour - possibly more 
so since one could conceive of a news server recovering a trashed news 
base.

Would rn/trn/etc. have marked the sub-300 articles as read the first 
day? Would it then recover them the next?

-Alan.

-- 
Alan Staniforth ** alan@bones.demon.co.uk ** alan_s@cix.compulink.co.uk
"Meum est propositum/In taberna mori,/Ut sint vina proxima/Morientis ori."
       -- Anon.