Subject: [NNTP] Article ranges

From: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 10:06:17 -0800

I see that our current draft, following RFC 2980, only allows nnn-nnn and
nnn- as ranges.

   The message-id argument indicates a specific article.  The range
   argument may be any of the following:
   o  an article number
   o  an article number followed by a dash to indicate all following
   o  an article number followed by a dash followed by another article
      number

INN also supports -nnn and -.  Should we mention anything at all about
this in the draft, or just stick with what we have?  My inclination is to
stay with what we have, since it's easier to turn the latter form into a
supported range by just prepending "1" and this description is simpler,
but I wanted to make sure that we had an explicit discussion about this
and I don't recall it coming up before.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email-masked])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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From: Ken Murchison <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 13:14:28 -0500

> supported range by just prepending "1" and this description is simpler,

Agreed.  The range only needs to be open ended on the high side, not the 
low side (as the low end is always known to be "1").  Any client 
software which is either too lazy to specify the "1" or is trying to 
save the 1 byte of bandwidth, is destined to die.  ;)

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
--PGP Public Key--    http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp

---

From: "Clive D.W. Feather" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 08:52:29 +0000

> stay with what we have,

Yes. We don't know that other servers do it, it's trivial to work around
the lack of it, and it's a functional change at a very late date. Don't do
it.

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <[email-masked]>   | Tel:    +44 20 8495 6138
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