🚀 go-pugleaf

After much consideration Terrance Richard Boyes decided to share these
wise words:
>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...

One of the few things I liked with Tin.  TP apparently doesn't backup
the file, and the 'mark as read' is rather limited.  Eg to get my read
list in a moderate state I would be happy for most newsgroups to mark as
read all articles over a week old.  


>> 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).

Yep, pretty obvious after a peek at an index of RFCs.  Though I couldn't
find SORFC1036 in my brief venture out, (which is presumably different
from draft-ietf-drums-msg-fmt-04.txt which updates RFC822).

However I did find some useful Internet-Drafts:
        draft-ietf-nntpext-base-04.txt
        draft-ietf-nntpext-imp-02.txt

>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.

It shouldn't be too hard, Winsock supports both synchronous &
asynchronous use of sockets.  And Win 95/NT is properly multi-threaded
so blocking a thread whilst waiting for an NNTP response makes
programming fairly straihtforward.


>As for XOVER and the like, I'd be interesting in finding any
>definitive documentation as well![1] 

Of the two documents I mentioned above the first replaces RFC977, the
second describes a few extensions including XOVER.

[snip]
>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).

Agreed, but ...

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

... the scary thing is that draft-ietf-nntpext-imp-02.txt observes:
::    NEWNEWS is one of the commands frequently disabled.


>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.

Suggestions noted, thanks.

As a first pass writing a local news server could be the way to go.  It
would allow some interesting things, such as; processing of Cancels or
NoCeM, using a score file during expiry...  And talking NNTP to a local
server is ideal for generating spam cancels, eg for retromoderation.


>Writing a newsreader is a different matter... 

Indeed, probably I wont write one.  But now is the time to read up and
work out how hard it would actually be.  Of all the newsreaders I've
used on Unix, DOS & Windows down the years I've found all of them
awkward and cumbersome in some way.  Eg I want to:
+   Present articles in different orders for different newsgroups.
+   Forward copies of articles that include the headers, to report
    spam.  Doubly so if I want the complaint to come from a different
    userid, such as newsmaster@ubik.dcu.


Thanks for the reply.  ;-)


Tony
-- 
  There's another train there always is
  maybe the next one is yours
  get up and climb aboard another train