dennis@rlgvax.UUCP (Dennis Bednar) (07/03/86)
Suggestion for improving vnews 'n' command for cross-postings:
The problem with the 2.10.3 beta version of vnews from siesmo!rick that
I have is that the 'n' command may skip over an article posted to
multiple newsgroups (cross-posted). Yeah, I know about the 'A' "go to
article" command, so before you flame-on, please continue reading.
The way it works is that vnews looks at the line with "Newsgroups:",
and if the first newsgroup listed matches the current newsgroup you are
reading, you are allowed to see it. However, if the newsgroup you are
reading is the 2nd, 3rd, etc. group listed after "Newsgroups:", then
vnews skips over the article. The presumption is that you will see it
later when you are reading the newsgroup listed first.
This is a "feature" of the vnews software to avoid letting you read the
same article twice. With the high volume of news traffic, however, it
is quite likely that the article might expire before you read it in the
correct newsgroup.
Therefore, I suggest a slight modification to the algorithm as
follows: If an article is cross-posted, then your .newsrc file ought
to be consulted to see if you have read the article before in a
different newsgroup. If so, skip over the article, if not, then show
it. This can be implemented with the PDL:
for each fullpathname after the Newsgroup:
if (haveread(fullpathname))
return ALREADY_READ; /* skip over */
return NOT_READ_YET; /* show article */
haveread(fullpathname) /* like /usr/spool/news/net/unix/1 */ {
search the .newsrc file to see if has been read /* may
want to cache the entire .newsrc file in
* memory to make this operation much faster. */
}
--
-Dennis Bednar
{decvax,ihnp4,harpo,allegra}!seismo!rlgvax!dennis UUCP