Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.toronto.edu!ietf-nntp-distribution-owner Date: Tue, 25 Jun 1991 14:52:47 -0400 From: tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Theodore Ts'o) Message-ID: <9106251852.AA16304@tsx-11.MIT.EDU> Original-To: Rich Salz Original-Cc: ietf-nntp@turbo.bio.net, lear@turbo.bio.net, sob@tmc.edu References: Rich Salz's message of Tue, 25 Jun 91 11:28:35 EDT, <9106251528.AA12651@litchi.bbn.com> Subject: Re: NEWNEWS Reply-To: tytso@athena.mit.edu Address: 308 High Street, Medford, MA 02155 Phone: (617) 395-0154 Newsgroups: list.ietf-nntp Distribution: list Sender: list-admin@cs.toronto.edu Approved: list.ietf-nntp@mail.cs.toronto.edu Lines: 27 From: Rich Salz Date: Tue, 25 Jun 91 11:28:35 EDT With the proper set of indices, NEWNEWS becomes as cheap as just about any other command. Yes, but in the implementation which probably over 90% of the NNTP sites run, NEWNEWS is done by opening the history file, reading it out line by line, and performing a ngmatch() on each one. When your history file is 12 meg, and 230k lines, this is nontrivial. This ragging on an implementation really doesn't matter when we're discussing protocols issues, except that we should make sure that it's possible for a NNTP/NNRP server to elect _not_ to honor certain commands, such as NEWNEWS or the SEARCH commands that some people are requesting. The news admin at a particular site may not wish to spend the computrons/disk space for the various indices. Or a particular implementation of one of these commands could be done badly, and a particular site admin may wish to disable a particular command and remain within spec. I suppose that could be done now by making the NEWNEWS command return a "502 access restriction or permission denied" response, but perhaps we should have a more specific error code to indicate that a server is not going to allow a particular searching command (possibly because it's a specific index is not available or because it would return too much information). - Ted