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From: coolidge@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Xrefs:, and the RFCs (was Re: Supersedes problems...)
Message-ID: <1989Sep1.181559.14659@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 1 Sep 89 18:15:59 GMT
References: <1989Aug31.174054.15398@paris.ics.uci.edu> <1989Aug31.234545.23296@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu> <1989Sep1.005346.17308@utst <1429@intercon.UUCP>
Sender: news@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu
Reply-To: coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu (John L. Coolidge)
Organization: U of Illinois, CS Dept., Systems Research Group
Lines: 40

amanda@intercon.uu.net (Amanda Walker) writes:
>In article <1989Sep1.044044.6996@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu>, I write:
>> All in all, I think Xref: is quite possibly a case where the RFC should
>> be changed to reflect the fact that rewriting it and passing changes on
>> is a 'safe' thing to do (this includes delete-and-pass-on).

>I think, on the other hand, that the fact that Xref "needs" to be treated
>specially is prime evidence that the article header is the wrong place to
>put the information, since it is not information about the article itself,
>but about the article's history on a given system.

I tend to agree here as well. As I think I mentioned somewhere, Xref: is
more-or-less a performance hack (to avoid yet another side database). Of
course, the history file entry should really be sufficient for this. The
major problem with taking Xref: out is that it would break NNTP-based
newsreaders --- a new command similar to XDHR which performs a lookup on
the history file and returns the entry would probably be required in
lieu of Xref: (actually, I think this may be a good idea, since it ties in
well with some tentative ideas bouncing around my head about what a good
newsreader should do).

>Of course, I'm something of a radical in that I think that we should throw
>out the whole idea of "article numbers" and just do everything by message-id,
>but that will take even more of a complete rewrite than C news...

Article numbers are useful if you're using a linearly oriented newsreader
such as rn. They're not nearly as useful when using nn, for instance.
They do tend to help performance, as it's fairly cheap to grab a couple
of numbers and subtract. In addition, it costs a whole lot less to store
article numbers in a file for use in determining what a given user has
read.

But in general I tend to agree that doing things by messageid is the
"right" way to do things. I'm just not sure yet if it can be done cheaply
enough.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
John L. Coolidge     Internet:coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP:uiucdcs!coolidge
Of course I don't speak for the U of I (or anyone else except myself)
Copyright 1989 John L. Coolidge. Copying allowed if (and only if) attributed.