[leafnode-list] Re: How to modify what leafnode offers through XOVER ?

[Bernd Felsche]

On Saturday 09 October 2004 11:11, Matthias Andree wrote:
> Xavier Maillard <zedek at gnu-rox.org> writes:
> > On  8 oct 2004, Matthias Andree wrote:
> >> Xavier Maillard <zedek at gnu-rox.org>
> >> writes:
> >> > How can I add other stuff (NNTP-..., keywords, ...) ?

> >> You cannot, the overview format is hardcoded to match what is
> >> usually offered and to match RFC-2980.

> > Why, then, does INN offer something to "overload" this RFC ?

> Probably because someone has written the code do to that :)

> Seriously, are there any clients that can take advantage of more
> information in the overview?

It's possible. Bit of a chicken and egg problem really. Newsreaders
have been around for decades; most of the possible paradigms
explored but there remains the possibility of novelty.

I've been looking at replacing the overview functions entirely with
something that optionally talks to a (free) SQL database at the
backend. The main reason to do so is when there are newsgroups with
many articles (driven by a desire to use "leafnode" as an NNTP
front-end to mailing list archives. Pattern matches should be more
flexible, with the ability to pattern match across newsgroups. It
basically scales better than the flat overiew files but is a bigger
initial overhead. You wouldn't really bother unless you're expecting
50,000+ articles in a newsgroup.

By taking the .overview out of the tree clients that expect to be
able to read the overview files directly, will no longer be unable
to do so... nowadays not much of a loss.

The opportunity exists to push just about the whole newsspool tree
into such a database, leaving just a message.id hierarchy for
redundancy. That's a much bigger project, which is probably best
prototyped "from scratch" in something like Python; and separate
from leafnode. "Papercut" illustrates what could be done; although
that fronts a forum-type database.

-- 
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