Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucsd!brian
From: brian@ucsd.Edu (Brian Kantor)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: .newsrc across the network
Message-ID: <10084@ucsd.Edu>
Date: 30 Oct 89 03:40:05 GMT
References: <NELSON.89Oct26150644@image.clarkson.edu> <1510@intercon.com> <10082@ucsd.Edu> <1516@intercon.com>
Reply-To: brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor)
Organization: The Avant-Garde of the Now, Ltd.
Lines: 28

In article <1516@intercon.com> amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker) writes:
>Hmm again.  From what I've seen, newsreaders are getting more complex, not
>simpler.  I mean, with NN, rn, GNUS, and so on, newsreaders seem to be heading
>more toward "NNTP peer" status.

Well, for the record, I think the right thing to do in newsreading is
for incoming news to be stuffed into some sort of a relational database
with some sort of natural-language analysis routines, and then to allow
the user some sort of "medline"-like ability to retrieve articles based
on ad-hoc combinations of author, date, subject, keywords, hatsize, and
phase of the moon.

Of course, that would require lots of on-line storage, so you would
want multi-gig optical storage so that you could keep the worthwile
newsgroups (yeah, both of them) on line forever.

Several of us have been blue-skying about building that, but short
of paying for another ingres license and/or writing a whole bunch of
crufty code, it isn't going to be developed here anytime soon.  Unless
we find a bunch of religiously-crazed graduate students.

Clearly something like this would require close coupling of the news
servers and readers, so we'd need a whole new protocol for constructing
and presenting queries across the network.  A Network News Reading
Protocol, as I think someone recently proposed calling it.

Oh wow!  I get to write ANOTHER RFC.  Maybe.
	- Brian