Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!deimos.cis.ksu.edu!unmvax!indri!polyslo!usc!orion.cf.uci.edu!uci-ics!nagel@beaver.ics.uci.edu
From: nagel@beaver.ics.uci.edu (Mark Nagel)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: NNTP 1.5 Patch 4
Keywords: NNTP 1.5 patch 4
Message-ID: <14701@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Date: 16 May 89 06:45:05 GMT
References: <157@lib.tmc.edu> <1720@ucsd.EDU>
Sender: news@paris.ics.uci.edu
Reply-To: nagel@beaver.ics.uci.edu (Mark Nagel)
Organization: University of California, Irvine - Dept of ICS
Lines: 33
In-reply-to: brian@ucsd.EDU (Brian Kantor)

In article <1720@ucsd.EDU>, brian@ucsd (Brian Kantor) writes:

|Hmm. Looks like it's time to publish that update to RFC977.  Any other
|changes to the specification you wanna make?

When I saw this, I first thought that it would be nice to have a way
to get to the information in the newsgroups file so that readers could
present group descriptions.  Then I realized that more generally, we need
a mechanism in NNTP to allow remote readers to access any file that a local
reader would need.  Some kind of general protocol command like:

LIST filename

which would retrieve some particular file (this could be abstracted to
one command per file type, similar to the way LIST is done now).  Then
there would be a corresponding set of allowable files list that would
either be builtin to the server or modifiable from some kind of
control file.  In some ways it would be nice to freeze that list in
the protocol, but then you lose future flexibility.  If instead, one
could get a list of available files and then request the ones you need
(e.g. active, newsgroups, etc.) then that would allow much more parity
between local readers and remote readers.  As long as the filenames in
question are agreed upon by convention (or mapped somehow if they
change), then NNTP would be much more powerful.

That's all I can think of right now.  I'm sure others have a large
wish list -- I'd like to see the functionality of NNTP increase a lot
with the new RFC.

Mark Nagel @ UC Irvine, Department of Information and Computer Science
                            +----------------------------------------+
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