ietf-nntp Re: the NEWNEWS command

[Brian Kantor]

A decade ago when we wrote RFC977, we envisioned that 'NEWNEWS' would be
implemented by simply reading forward in the history file until the
specified datestamp was found, then listing articles that matched the
patterns from there to EOF.

This is NOT rocket science, people.

Of course news is MUCH bigger now than then, but it's still a reasonable
way to do NEWNEWS.  A simple optimisation (for the reference implementation,
INN, and others) is to keep a DBM database of offsets into the history
file indexed by the timestamp, perhaps in minute increments.  That's not
a lot of data - and all you have to do is a simple overwrite store into
the DB each time you receive an article.  Expire takes care of flushing
out the old entries.  Keep one more that marks the first timestamp on
file.  Just fetch the index, seek, and on you go.

Adding the distribution field to the history file would help if your
clients are doing NEWNEWS retrievals with distribution specified.

I think NEWNEWS is useful enough and cheap enough to implement that we
ought to keep it.  I'll stop repeating myself now.
	- Brian