Subject: Re: Substantive edits to draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-07

From: John Stanley <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2006 11:54:27 -0700 (PDT)

John Stanley <stanley@xxxxxxxx> wrote (in suggested text):

> Each crossposted article contains the same message id, but may
> have different newsgroup-specific identifiers.

Seth Breidbart <sethb@xxxxxxxxx>:

>Huh?  Since there's only _one_ article, it contains _several_
>newsgroups in the appropriate header.

I didn't say anything about the newsgroups header field. I said "different
newsgroup-specific identifiers."

>(Whatever a "newsgroup-specific
>identifier" is, the article might have several, but can't have
>different ones for different newsgroups.)

You are patently wrong. A crossposted message may have article number
12345 in newsgroup A and article number 54321 in newsgroup B. The article
number, being one of the means of retrieving articles from a newsgroup,
is the 'newsgroup-specific identifier' I was talking about. In fact, as
I recall, those newsreaders that mark crossposted articles as read do so
using article numbers and not message id.

Dan Kohn <dan@xxxxxxxxxxx>:

>I don't mean to be pedantic, but I thought the definition of a unique 
>article is that it has a unique message-ID.

One article will have an almost certainly different newsgroup-specific
identifier in each newsgroup in which it appears. Whilst we may call
that "one article because it has one message id", in many ways it acts
like multiple articles.

Russ Allbery <rra@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>(Read "article number"
>for "newsgroup-specific identifier" if this isn't clear.)

Exactly. I was hesitant to tie the term too closely to any specific
implementation so I did not say "article number".

---

From: John Stanley <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2006 17:22:29 -0700 (PDT)

Seth Breidbart <sethb@xxxxxxxxx>:

>That's what I missed: that the "newsgroup-specific identifier" wasn't
>actually part of the article.

In the articles I read, the article number appears in the Xref header
field, and must do so to enable crosspost-thread-killing.