🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <319747a2.28728246@news1.news.demon.net>,
Mike Mann <mike@kempston.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>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, .. ?

It would break the kill file processing in trn (which would think that it
had already evaluated the status of the lower numbered article.  In 
general I would consider it to be a violation of the spirit of the RFCs and
that the RFCs were written at a time when the spirit more than the letter
mattered, because everyone knew what was meant.

See my followup to a thread on distributed servers on news.software.nntp.

>
>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?

Restricting to NEWNEWS is effectively restricting to Demon, as most
sites discourage, ban, or even take technical measures to prevent its
use, because it overloads off the-ftp-site versions of news servers.

-- 
David Woolley, London, England          david@djwhome.demon.co.uk