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From: loverso@Xylogics.COM (John Robert LoVerso)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: New .newsrc format [was Dynamic "smart" expiration?]
Message-ID: <8170@xenna.Xylogics.COM>
Date: 5 Jan 90 20:50:45 GMT
References: <69903@looking.on.ca> <433@texas.dk>
Reply-To: loverso@Xylogics.COM (John Robert LoVerso)
Organization: Xylogics, Inc., Burlington MA
Lines: 27

How about taking this on from the other side?  Instead of insisting
that all future news readers correspond to the .newsrc that you can
define today (just as most existing news readers use the .newsrc
originated by readnews!), why not just let each newsreader use the
bookkeeping method it wants.  If you need a way of letting the
news system `know' which groups have been read (for either smart
expiration or arbitron-like statistics), then have an explicit
accounting mechanism by which the newsreader informs the system
whats gone on.  And by all means standardize the format of the
accounting record!  Something that could decode into information
along the lines of:
	user joe in alt.air read 5 saved 2 skipped 3 discarded 113

A nice thing about this is that most of that information is known
in nntpd, and so you could provide psuedo-statistics for unmodified
NNTP clients that way (it might only know about supposedly `read'
articles).  

But, no matter what, a newsreader shouldn't be shackled to using
a particular bookkeeping method.

John
-- 
John Robert LoVerso			Xylogics, Inc.  617/272-8140x284
loverso@Xylogics.COM			Annex Terminal Server Development Group

John