ietf-nntp Section 11.5 - NEWNEWS

[David Riley]

On Mon, Jul 24, 2000 at 07:49:19PM +0100, Andrew Gierth wrote:
> >>>>> "David" == David Riley <David.Riley at software.com> writes:
> 
>  David> The NEWGROUPS command accepts both GMT and UTC as keywords.
>  David> NEWNEWS should probably support both keywords as well.
>  David> (Currently, only GMT is listed.)
> 
> I mentioned this before. Existing practice is to recognise only GMT
> for both commands; introducing UTC has no benefit other than to
> satisfy pedants.

In any case, it should be consistent across both NEWGROUPS and NEWNEWS
commands.

>  David> Finally, I think we should consider making NEWNEWS an
>  David> extension.
> 
> This has already been covered at some length - please consult the
> list archives

I'm still trying to track down this thread in the archives.  If anybody
has complete archives in some mbox format, I'd love to grab them.

>  David> I think that NEWNEWS is not always implemented, and is
>  David> disabled in many cases.
> 
> It's disabled because people have insisted on implementing it
> inefficiently and then objecting to the resulting load. It's not
> as though it's hard to implement efficiently.
> 
> (Note: we should probably add some qualifications to make it easier:
> specifically, an explicit statement that the output of NEWNEWS is
> not ordered, and may contain duplicates.)

Implementation aside, many servers do not provide NEWNEWS access.
If client authors are writing news clients based on the standards, I think
they should be made aware, that there software will not be usable on many
systems if they rely upon NEWNEWS.  If we're documenting common practice,
I would argue that not providing NEWNEWS is common practice.  
INN suggests against enabling it, Diablo does not implement it, and our
software (Typhoon, Twister, and Breeze) ships with it defaulted to off.

-- 
David Riley
David.Riley at software.com - Software.com, Inc. (Vancouver, B.C.)