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

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

Sudish Joseph <sudish@mindspring.com> writes:

> I did a dejanews search on 'xref add' (using "performance" as a
> keyword was a lose) over news.software.* before I accepted that
> statement (remember, I was the one wanting xref :-).  Most hits fit one
> of 3 classes:  a) INN/NOV faq :-)  b) Suggestions that xref be added
> w/o any performance analysis  c) Statements to the effect that no PC
> readers support xref, so why should J. Random Sysop add it.  

Well, you should take what you read on news.software.readers with a
few shovels of salt.  There's quite a lot of people there who don't
know *anything* about *anything*.   (And that's just speaking of
newsreader authors.  The users are *really* clueless.  :-)  

> This was more or less my argument.  The newsdmin pointed out that
> there will be a hit in download time due to the extra size of the
> xover data.

The size increase will be in the 10% range.  However, since
modern newsreaders are in fact able to make use of the data, it will
mean that less data will be needed to be transferred from the ISP to
the users since one doesn't have to read any article twice.

> Maybe move the hashtb funcs into nnoo or something?  A new user might
> well not enable NoCeM support (or those suckers who, like me, cannot
> use a free US-released PGP in the US w/o residency, and cannot import
> a non-US version into the US--has this changed, anyone?)  Not a big
> deal, though.

Well, I sorta meant that one could use the same mechanism without
using the actual NoCeM code.

> Also, what do you think about adding a adding a test of overview.fmt
> to nntp-server-opened-hook?  I think there's a good idea there.  Why
> not have a probe function that sent XOVER, etc., to the server and
> determined the optimal config for nntp reading?  Running this every
> time seems bogus...maybe a nntp-suggest-kewl-config command? 

That's a good idea.  I've added this to the Red Gnus todo list.

> Yeah, writing that out to a file seems yucky.  How about running that
> scorefile/hashtb over all groups when quitting GNUS?

Requesting headers for all groups when exiting Gnus?  I don't think
that's a good idea.

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