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From: simon@its63b.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: Can 'rrn' check for new news?
Summary: lose, lose!
Message-ID: <1357@its63b.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 17 May 88 12:18:19 GMT
References: <322@fxgrp.UUCP>
Sender: simon@its63b.ed.ac.uk
Reply-To: simon%lfcs.ed.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk (Simon Brown)
Organization: LFCS, University of Edinburgh
Lines: 22
Posted: Tue May 17 08:18:19 1988

Keywords:

>>rrn can't check for new news as distributed.  On startup it snarfs
>>the active file from the server and makes a local copy.  Since the
>>local copy doesn't change, rrn doesn't think there is new news.
>> ...
>
>Well, since that's the way it is, I decided to fix it.
>
>Here is a patch to 'rrn' ... It adds a new command line-option ... which, if 
> set, causes 'rrn' to check for new news once it has gone through all the 
> newsgroups.  When this option is set, 'rrn' will never set the default reply 
> to "q" at the "End of newsgroups--what next?" prompt, thereby allowing this 
> check to be repeated over and over until "q" is explicitly typed.

Aargh! This seems a pretty crude/bizarre way of doing it. A more reasonable 
approach would be to send a request to the server, saying "send me the active 
file again, if it's more recent than my local cache copy". Then, when the
end-of-newsgroups is reached - if new news has arrived, the active file will
be resent, the default reply is set to 'n' and you continue, otherwise it'll
be set to 'q' and the default is quit. Of course, I imagine NNTP can't provide
such services (can it?).

	Simon.