ietf-nntp "Common NNTP Extensions" document updated

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Vincent Archer said:
> I have a site that rely on passive feeds a lot, for various "historical"
> reasons, notably the fact that I'm using a laptop which is only
> infrequently connected to the network. I've discussed firsthand with the
> admin at the other end on when NEWNEWS was to be used, and the answer was,
> after a few tries, "never".

You clearly didn't talk to us.

> Having all articles grouped within the same newsgroup also means that you are
> using a lot less inode seeks (you're staying in the same directory), as
> opposed to massive

This is parochial - it assumes one particular implementation.

>> It also makes it easy to fill in gaps in the feed from other
>> servers. That can be done with other methods but it means tracking
>> the article number high water marks for all the servers as well
>> as a history of fetched article IDs.
> You are already doing this in your server.

Eh ? If you are going to fill in gaps with NEWNEWS, you need to store one
date per feed. That's all. To do it by articles, you need to store a last
article number per group per feed. Much more data. Furthermore, if you have
a lot of overlap between feeds, NEWNEWS allows you to optimize the traffic
because you only fetch article IDs initially, then only fetch *new*
articles. Using other techniques sends you a load of superfluous data.

> But this means that, instead of keeping track of high water, you have to keep
> track of dates for each group.

No, you can use one date per peer.

> Plus the hassle of synchronising your date
> with that of the server at the exact instant you are doing NEWNEWS (else
> you could end up asking for the same article at the end of a session, then at
> the beginning of another).

Big deal - put a deliberate overlap in, and use your history file to weed
out duplicates.

None of this is rocket science - on the contrary, we have tens of thousands
of customers reading news like this every day.

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather     | Work:  <clive at demon.net>  | Tel: +44 181 371 1138
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