From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Sat Oct 02 1999 - 22:52:48 CDT
Ralph Babel <rbabel@babylon.swb.de> writes:
> Charles Lindsey wrote:
>> In order to prevent the reinjection of expired articles into the news
>> stream, serving agents MUST refuse articles whose Date header predates
>> the earliest articles of which they normally keep record.
> That's backwards. Any site is free to accept whatever it wants
> to. However, it MUST NOT _forward_ an article if it cannot determine
> whether it has already done so before. How about "MUST NOT forward more
> than once"? This would be in line with RFC 2119.
Except just as there are circumstances in which you want to receive
articles with old Date headers (backfilling a server from another, for
example), there are circumstances when you want to reforward articles to a
peer.
But I agree that putting restrictions on the forwarding is better than
putting restrictions on the acceptance; news servers can obviously
implement that by restricting acceptance. This one may call for an
"except in special circumstances" sort of exception.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>