Re: ietf-nntp FAQ Extension to NNTP

[Dave Barr <[e-mail]>]

This whole protocol is rather unnecessary.

There's already a proposed standard for identifying FAQs -- it's just
a matter of getting newsreaders to use it.

son-of-rfc1036 has the "Article-Names:" header, to identify not only
FAQs but other sorts of periodic postings.  One simply has to do
an "Xhdr Article-Names" and then concatenate that list with articles
crossposted to *.answers.  Here's proof-of-concept Perl code:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
#
# listfaq      List and get FAQ's for a group
#
# Author: David Barr <[e-mail]>
# Much code stolen from repost_faq by Bill Fenner <[e-mail]>il>,
# which I think he stole some from post_faq by jik.
#
# rewritten to use Net::NNTPClient.pm
#
# $Id: listfaq,v 1.1 1994/05/13 22:06:26 barr Exp barr $
#    -v   verbose.  More wordy
#
use News::NNTPClient;
require 'getopts.pl';

### Fiddle with these.
@faq_groups=("news.answers", "psu.answers");
$DEFAULT_NNTP_SERVER="news.math.psu.edu";	# Who do we usually talk to?

# Be sure you have "Xref:full" in overview.fmt on server.
#
# Comment this out if you don't have "Article-Names:Xref" in overview.fmt
# or if you don't mind it if the server takes a real long time to do
# an XHDR Article-Names
# This header is defined in son-of-rfc1036
# $check_article_name=1;

### stop fiddling

do Getopts(':v');
$verbose=$opt_v;
&usage if (($group=$ARGV[0]) eq '');

$nntpserver=$ENV{'NNTPSERVER'} || $DEFAULT_NNTP_SERVER;
$ORGANIZATION=$ENV{'ORGANIZATION'} || $DEFAULT_ORGANIZATION;

$open=0;
print "Connecting to $nntpserver...\n" if ($verbose);
$c=new News::NNTPClient($nntpserver);
#$c->debug(2);
print "Selecting $group....\n" if ($verbose);
($first,$last)=$c->group($group);
die "Can't search $group: $last\n" if ($first < 1);
@ng=($group);
$everything=(&ngcheck);   # assume all are faqs if we search a faq group
print "Scanning $group.\n" if ($verbose);
@header=$c->xhdr("Xref",$first,$last);
foreach $line (@header) {
	($artno,$server,$rest)=split(/ /,$line,3);
	@ng=split(/ /,$rest);
	if (($everything) || (&ngcheck)) {
		$arts{$artno}=1;
	}
}
$_[2]=$last;

if ($check_article_name==1) {
	@header=$c->xhdr("Article-Names",$first,$last);
	print "Scanning $group.\n" if ($verbose);
	foreach $line (@header) {
		($artno,$server,$rest)=split(/ /,$lne[1],3);
		@ng=split(/ /,$rest);
		if (($everything) || (&ngcheck)) {
			$arts{$artno}=1;
		}
	}
}

@artlist=sort increasing (keys arts);

print "retrieving articles..\n" if ($verbose);

foreach $art (@artlist) {
	@tmphead=$c->xhdr("Subject",$art);
	($rest,$s)=split(/ /,$tmphead[0],2);
	write;
}


format top =
art no   Subject
-------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------