ietf-nntp NEWNEWS deprecation.

[Vincent Archer]

On Wed, Dec 03, 1997 at 01:10:12PM -0500, Dave Fielder wrote:
> The above paragraph may be a bunch of blather, except that it points to
> a return to the dumb client days and hence a increase in the demand for
> NEWNEWS. If NEWNEWS did not exist today then today would be a good time to
> add such a feature.

The answer is: why would NEWNEWS be more useful than an OVER/HDR?

There are exactly two points in which NEWNEWS is more powerful than (X)HDR
for fetching news.

- NEWNEWS can get Message-Ids from multiple newsgroups at the same time.
- NEWNEWS need to store only one mark per server rather than one per server
	per group

If those constraints are not important, then NEWNEWS gives you exactly
nothing more than HDR. Using DATE+NEWNEWS single-group yields only little
less amount of network traffic than GROUP single-group+XHDR.

If you are not just fetching news for further processing, but fetching
them for reading, as you "news-in-a-watch" analogy indicates, then NEWNEWS
is totally useless, because to READ news, you need a lot more than getting
articles. Given the volume in news groups, you need a lot of pre or
post-processing.  NEWNEWS doesn't offer any processing facility: you need
to download everything on your watch (ouch) and then process locally. If
you're accessing news from a watch-sized processor, you need to request
more advanced processing from your news server. At least XOVER-level, and
probably more (such as the search facilities suggested).

Your watch-reader will not be able to cope with that except in very
tightly constrained situations - such as a weather or circulation newsgroup,
in which you have the guarantee that any article is important. And in
that case, you can gain a lot of time by asking "GROUP single-group", then
start immediately fetching new articles - whose numbers you know.

> But more importantly you also hurt such items as electronic organizers,
> robotic filters/seachers/news gathers, and dumb clients that do use NEWNEWS
> and will continue to use NEWNEWS tomorrow.

If these applications use NEWNEWS, then they'll be outperformed by anything
that uses the more advanced processing options that already exist today,
except maybe for the robotic news gatherer/searcher, who needs to fetch loads
and loads of articles.

NEWNEWS can be, implementation issues aside, marginally more useful than
other methods in exactly *one* situation: If you are fetching a very large
amount of related newsgroups from multiple servers. If you are fetching a
small amount of newsgroups, XHDR gives you exactly the same thing. And, if
you are fetching from a single server, you don't need to know the Message-Ids
of the articles, because every single article is a new article, and getting
the range (I have 78-88, and have already got 1-85, let's fetch 86 to 88)
provide you with enough information, at less bandwidth.

-- 
Vincent ARCHER  -=-=-  Herve Schauer Consultants -=-=-   archer at hsc.fr
Tel: +33 1 41 40 97 00                          Fax: +33 1 41 40 97 09
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