Subject: newsgroups

From: Sing Yeong Kong <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 1996 00:13:54 +0000

How do you configure pine to work with more than 1 news collections?

I've managed to put 2 news collections in my setup (under the section on
news collections) but when I subscribe to a newsgroup, it appears on both
collections. if I try to delete from 1 collection, it becomes removed from
both. 

Thanks

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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Nov 1996 01:19:46 -0800

On 26 Nov 1996, Vikas Agnihotri wrote:
>  Well. thats because Pine __supports__ only ONE newsrc file. A lo t of
> other newsreaders out there support a per-NNTP-server newsrc file so
> that you can have  adifferent newsrc file for each NNTP server
> that you use..

It's on my list to implement this.  It's not trivial, because the way the
code is currently constructed it has no idea of the name of the NNTP host
when it goes to access the .newsrc file.

I've tried without success to get a precise specification of how this
works in other news software.  Such questions as:
 1) Is .newsrc still used?  Under what conditions?
 2) How do you know when to create .newsrc.host instead of .newsrc?
 3) What is written as the host part?  Is the host name canonicalized,
    and how?  [Stop once CNAMEs are resolved and have a fully-qualified
    domain name, or do you get the IP address and look up the PTR record
    for that address?]  Is case coerced to lowercase?  etc.
 4) Suppose there is a local news spool as well as NNTP.  What are the
    rules for .newsrc?

I can easily decide these details on my own, but if the intent is to be
interoperable with other news readers I need to know their rules.  I very
much do not want to guess at these rules, only to find out much later
(when the bug reports come in) that the guess was wrong in some subtle
way.

If it isn't important to be interoperable with other news readers, I'd do
something much better than .newsrc; how would you like to have all the
flags (not just the deleted flag) be sticky across sessions, so it
remembers what postings you've answered, what messages you've read, you
can flag messages, etc.). 

Actually, we've already decided that sooner or later there will be a
better mechanism than .newsrc.  The question is if that is "sooner" as
part of supporting multiple servers or "later".

-- Mark --	Read http://www.imap.org for the "best kept secret in email"

DoD #0105, R90/6 pilot, FAX: (206) 685-4045  ICBM: N 47 39'35" W 122 18'39"
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.

---

From: Andrej Borsenkow <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Nov 1996 09:42:01 +0300 (MSK)

> when it goes to access the .newsrc file.

Another related problem is how Pine handles list of known groups on
server. Currently, Pine *always* fetches newsgroups list when I SUbscribe
to new group. In case of slow line it is pretty time-(and
money-)consuming.

What about storing local copy of available newsgroups and update them if
neccessary (e.g. when requested group was not found)? I understand, that
it would be hard to do currently, as you have no idea which server is
accessed, but if you are moving to multiple servers support, it should be
easy.

> can flag messages, etc.).                                         

Do it!!!

greetings

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