🚀 go-pugleaf

Anthony Naggs <URL:mailto:amn@ubik.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Finally my tolerance of Turnpike's quirks has expired.   (It trashed my
> 'usernews' file, it's record of which articles I've read, etc...) 

Well any program (or user) may do that anyway... Tin handles it
resaonably well in that it at least backs up the list of read
articles when you run it. So _usually_ you only lose the last
session...

> As a little detour whilst looking at other packages, I want to see how
> difficult it would be to write my own news reader/collector.  Obviously
> I have RFC977 (& 850!), but I'm sure there must be supplementary

RFC1036 and SORFC1036. And RFC0822 (so you can handle email replies
from your newsreader).

> material, (eg descriptions of XOVER & XHDR).  I'd appreciate suggestions
> of what to read & where to find it.  :-)

Well as far as a news collector goes, and depending on how you
want to deal with killfiling and such like isn't too difficult.
At least the NNTP side isn't. There are a small number of commands
with simple syntax and fairly generic return codes. Of course getting
that code to talk to anything else is another matter, and I don't
have a clue how easy (or not) that is under Windows.

As for XOVER and the like, I'd be interesting in finding any
definitive documentation as well![1] I've been looking at adding
more killfiling abilities to tin using overview files (if anyone's
interested I've got a working sol'n to filtering on Newsgroups:
 - even when you don't have the crossposted groups in your local
newsbase - Path: and Archive-Name:)

Another big difference is whether you use NEWNEWS (which gives
you a list of msgids to download) or retrieval by article number
(which means you have to store a local copy of which article
numbers have been downloaded for the machine - as well as 
individual user copies of what they've read).

NB that killfiling is better with XOVER, but NEWNEWS is easier
to implement, especially for use with multiple servers (since
you only need to store when you last accessed that server, all
dupes can be dealt with using a history file).

And remember some servers may support a limited set of commands.

You may find it useful to look at the source for INN, NNTPd, tin,
slrn and the like. And for a relatively simple view of how the
NNTP side works, NewNews.cmd which is in the one of the Demon OS/2
setups is a Rexx program and therefore relatively easy to read.
Also to cut testing costs down to a minimum it's handy to install a
local newsserver.

[1] though with a little experimentation most of the syntax for
a given server isn't too hard to work out.

Writing a newsreader is a different matter... Though there's an
obvious relationship. The RFCs tell you about how to collect the
news, but not what to do with it. Turnpike et al. tend to store
all the news in a single file, many UNIX-originated programs
use a file per article. There are various advantages to both
methods.

-- 
<URL:http://www.pierrot.co.uk/>                                  Team AMIGA
It's not the size of the ship, it's the size of the waves.  - Little Richard