Re: Red GNUS suggestion: pseudo Xref: handling w/o NOV support.

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@ifi.uio.no>]

Sudish Joseph <sudish@mindspring.com> writes:

> My news admin pointed out a good reason for not having Xref: full in
> their overview.fmt.  The vast majority of their clients use PC-based
> readers and none of those readers support xref handling. 

That might be a good reason if not for a slight niggle:  It's
bullshit.  Most modern newsreaders that run under MicroSloth
"operating systems" use the Xref header.  (At least that's what I've
been told.)

Even if it were true -- so what?  Adding Xref to the NOV databases
doesn't hurt newsreaders that don't make use of the information.  So
not adding Xref to the databases is rather, uhm.  Let me stop there
before I get nailed by CDA² (coming soon to an Internet near you).

> Hmm, it just struck me.  We already have all the message-id's for
> articles that we haven't read.  All we have to do is generate a
> transient scorefile that lowered on those msg-ids.  This wouldn't be
> slow for even large groups, scoring is very fast in GNUS.

This is a very good idea.  Actually, we don't even have to use
scoring.  We just add the Message-IDs to the NoCeM hashtable, which
will efficiently censor all articles that we have already read.

The drawback here is (of course) that such an approach wouldn't work
if you read one article in one session and the other copy of the
article in another session.  We could write the list of Message-IDs
already seen to a file, but that file would grow rather big...

-- 
  "Yes.  The journey through the human heart 
     would have to wait until some other time."