Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!oliveb!olivey!jerry
From: jerry@olivey.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: Useful NNTP Patch
Keywords: nntpxmit speedup
Message-ID: <47388@oliveb.olivetti.com>
Date: 31 Aug 89 20:01:50 GMT
References: <237@wugate.wustl.edu>
Sender: news@oliveb.olivetti.com
Reply-To: jerry@olivey.UUCP (Jerry Aguirre)
Organization: Olivetti ATC; Cupertino, Ca
Lines: 49

In article <237@wugate.wustl.edu> chris@wugate.wustl.edu (Chris Myers) writes:
>a) Modify rnews/inews to add a 'Z' flag in the sys file (used instead of the
>'F' flag).  The 'Z' option causes rnews to create batch file entries of the
>form: "<path> <messageID>" rather than just "<path>".

I have also made this change locally and have found it useful.  I used
the "Q" (Queue) flag instead of "Z" but that is, of course, not
important.

A more important difference is in how the file was organized.  I write
it as:

	<messageID> pathname

instead of the reverse.  This makes it much simpler to check for the new
format.  It is only necessary to check if the first character is an "<".
I was a little leary of the other format because there is no guarantee
that an "<" won't be imbedded in a path name.  For example if one did an
index for "<" on a pathname that looked like:

	/usr/spool/newsfile/<890831FE03@foo.bar>

one could confuse the pathname with an ID.  The above is a perfectly
legal path name in Unix and I can immagine a news system that would use
something like that.

I have discussed this with others and they have convinced me that it
would be desirable to accept multiple pathnames and even no pathnames at
all.  (This is primarily for compatability with CNEWS though others
might benifit.)  The optional formats would then be:

		pathname
		pathname pathname ...
		<messageID>
		<messageID> pathname
		<messageID> pathname pathname ...

Handling a message ID by itself shouldn't be too difficult as there is
already code to handle a request for an article ID and find the pathname
from the history file.  I happen to feel this is a high overhead way of
doing it but as it is not difficult to code it should probably be
supported.  The multiple pathnames handle the case where the article
might be expired early in one group but still exist in another.

I suggest that we decide on a standard for NNTP that the different
versions of news can code for.  Making the nntpxmit code flexible now
will prevent future hacking on the code to make it work for "DNews".

				Jerry