ietf-nntp Dropping the Distribution option from Newnews?

[Jonathan Grobe]

There is currently a thread going on in news.software.nntp about
the newnews command. Apparently the Distribution option creates
serious problems in implementing the command efficiently. Any thoughts
on deleting this option?

For example (from the thread):
From: davidsen at tmr.com (bill davidsen)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: Support for NEWNEWS
Date: 17 Feb 1998 16:58:06 GMT

In article <slrn6eiv1f.i7e.jon at white.oaktree.co.uk>,
Jon Ribbens <jon at oaktree.co.uk> wrote:

| bill davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> wrote:
| > | This is not a valid excuse to remove something from a deployed
| > | specification.
| > 
| > If low use, widespread non-support and inherent high resource use on
| > the server aren't valid, I think you're saying that progress
| > consists of adding new features forever with trimming any old
| > feature, no matter how poorly it works in the current environment.
| 
| Where on earth are you getting this "inherent high resource" from?

The NEWNEWS command specifies both groups (as a wildmat()) and
distributions as matching parameters. Therefore the server either
has to maintain another database to do a lookup in any reasonable
time, or look in the article for the distributions (the way INN does
it now).

So it would seem there is a choice between adding another database
entry per article, which is a small overhead but adds one more thing
to slow the "per incoming article" rate, or doing something
inefficient on demand. In either case I have to conclude that there
will be a non-trivial increase in CPU and disk usage to support this
feature.

Feel free to tell me how it can be done without either of these
approaches taking resources.