Subject: Re: ietf-nntp NEWNEWS queries

From: [email-masked] (Charles Lindsey)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 1997 19:05:24 GMT

In local.nntp Jon Ribbens <[email-masked]>:

>Charles Lindsey <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> 1. I want to say
>> 
>> NEWNEWS uk.comp.*,!uk.comp.os.win95,...
>> 
>> which obvioulsy uses wildmats. But the '!' character does not seem to be
>> supported for wildmats.

>It's not a wildmat, it's a comma-separated list of wildmats, each optionally
>preceded by a '!'.

Indeed so, and in the original RFC it got its own specific mention in the
semantics of NEWNEWS (there were no wildmats in those days).

But that text has gone from the new version, and it is not in wildmats
either. So is this a bug or a feature?

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing-------------------------
Email:     [email-masked]   Web:   http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
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---

From: [email-masked] (Charles Lindsey)
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 1997 11:04:25 GMT

In local.nntp "Richard Letts" <[email-masked]> wrote:

>I've experimented a little by modifying art.c, cauing inn to file the
>article in the newsgroup, instead of control. The results are a little
>disatisfying, since the control messages have appeared in all of the
>various newsreaders I have available.

>There is no way for the nntp-sender to know if the nntp-reader is actually
>a newsreading client, or someone using suck/slurp to pull news into a
>local news-server. Changing the semantics of NEWNEWS seems like a bad
>idea. It will cause users to start complaining about all the cancels
>they are now seeing.

Yes, I see the implementation difficulties. You only want these control
articles (rather their Message-IDs) to be sent in response to the NEWNEWS
command, and not in response to ARTICLE and friends. Effectively, this
means they must have each group involved listed against them in the
history file, but must not have their content in the actual directories
for those groups (except for the control group). For example, you could
arrange that, in the list of group names after the Message-ID in the
history file, the control group (if any) came first, and the rest after.
Then, in general, it would be known that the "real" groups in a history
file were those up to and including any mention of 'control'.

I am not familiar enough with the inner workings of INN to know whether
that would work or not. I think it would work OK in CNEWS.