🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm asking this question on behalf of a developer who has sought
advice from Demon but hasn't been given a definitive answer.

NNTP server implementations normally allocate article numbers, and
make the articles available on customer facing servers, in a
monotonically increasing sequence;  Demon's NewsBorg doesn't
necessarily do so and has been observed to back-fill articles on
occasion.

The question is this:  is it a reasonable assumption to make that any
article which appears with a number lower than the highest number so
far seen is one that is being back-filled, or should a client
implementation be expected to cope with article numbers being re-used
for new articles?

For example, would it break existing client implementations if a
server were to allocate the next number in sequence to one article
(say 50,000) and then to allocate an arbitrary low number (say 100) to
the next article which arrives and then to proceed with 101, 102, .. ?

I realise that this scenario probably wouldn't have an adverse effect
on clients which use NEWNEWS but would it break those which detect new
news by means of maintaining a range of article numbers retrieved so
far?

Any and all comments are most welcome.

Regards, Mike.

-- 
Home: mike@kempston.demon.co.uk | mike@kempston.powernet.co.uk
PGP 2.6.2i public key available from pgp@kempston.demon.co.uk