ietf-nntp "Common NNTP Extensions" document updated

Tom Hughes tom at compton.demon.co.uk
Sun Nov 30 01:24:08 PST 1997


In message <3480E070.3A8E0FE6 at spinne.com>
          Jeff Garzik <jeff.garzik at spinne.com> wrote:

> Can NEWNEWS be considered deprecated?  There are far better ways of
> determining the availability of new news within the current RFC 977
> protocol, not to mention the command NNTP extensions XHDR (to retrieve
> just the msg ids) or XOVER.

For some value of better maybe. Personally I consider NEWNEWS a
better solution for passive feeds and the other article number
based methods better for online readers.

Using NEWNEWS makes it easy for me to wind back my last fetch
time if I hear of an interesting discussion in a group I don't
normally take, or to do selective catchup when I return from
a break - I can do a full catchup of announce groups but just
get the last day or two of other groups.

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.

The point is that when I'm fetching news the question I want
to ask the server is "what articles have arrived in these
groups [the groups I take] since this time [the time I last
fetched news]". That is exactly what NEWNEWS asks.

Finally, as someone else has said, the fact that one major
server has an inefficient implementation is not a reason to
deprecate something.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.demon.co.uk)
http://www.compton.demon.co.uk/
...PURGE COMPLETE.



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