Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ucsd!brian
From: brian@ucsd.EDU (Brian Kantor)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: Streaming NNTP
Message-ID: <1759@ucsd.EDU>
Date: 10 Jun 89 04:34:28 GMT
References: <08-Jun-89.110238@192.41.214.2> <42723@oliveb.olivetti.com> <08-Jun-89.181633@192.41.214.2>
Reply-To: brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor)
Organization: The Avant-Garde of the Now, Ltd.
Lines: 26

Right now the NNTP protocol enhancements we're considering involve either
making the server run in NORMAL or STREAM mode, with the IHAVE command
in STREAM mode NOT prompting for the article but awaiting a BATCH
command to indicate that a whole batch of articles is coming, or else
a new command IGOT or YOUWANT or something like that which would
perform the same article lookup as IHAVE but expect that the actual
batch article transmission would be delayed until enough of them had
been gathered up to make it worthwhile.

Note that you save very little NNTP overhead this way; it's mainly for
the news posting software that's being fed by NNTP that this whole thing
exists.

Additional proposed extensions have to do with security and usage
measurement options.  More on this later.

Please note that if you make some change to the servers and clients that
affects the syntax of any of the commands or responses, you MUST use an
Xxxx command so that you will not be issuing any commands that an unmodified
server will barf on.  That is why XHDR is an X command (but will probably be
adopted into the mainstream in the next protocol revision).

	Brian Kantor	UCSD Office of Academic Computing
			Academic Network Operations Group  
			UCSD C-010, La Jolla, CA 92093 USA
			brian@ucsd.edu ucsd!brian BRIAN@UCSD