Re: [leafnode-list] retrieving threads

[Jim Hague <jim.hague@xxxxxxx>]

On 03-Oct-2001 Mike Castle wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 03:41:01PM +0200, Matthias Andree wrote:
>> krasel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Cornelius Krasel) writes:
>> > 
>> > What is NOV supposed to do?
>> 
>> It's not a command, it's just the name for the XOVER data bases (the
> 
> Does NOV stand for New Over View?  I believe that tin originally had
> XOVERVIEW (similar to what trn did with mthreads).  Both techniques were, I
> suspect, analyzed when XOVER was designed.  So most likely NOV is a
> historical leftover.

NOV was, I think, News OverView.

It dates from well before XOVER, and was an attempt at doing much the same
thing. But as far as I can find it had no NNTP component; this was from the days
when newsreaders (i.e. tin and trn) read directly out of the spool. The
intention was to provide a standardised overiew file and format to be
maintained by the news server. Some newsreaders had started building their own
overview databases locally, which were (a) all incompatible, (b) getting rather
big and (c) user-specific. NOV provided client libraries that could be hacked
into newsreaders to fish the overview from the central spool area.

XOVER is the same Done Properly. As to what Gnus is up to, GOK. Maybe it's
trying to find /var/spool/news/the/news/group/.overview. Does leafnode have
such a file? Maybe, if so, Gnus is finding it and trying to interpret the
contents as a NOV overview database. Or something. I wonder if NOV is a build
option (or whatever) on Gnus (I think I saw it last time I built trn), so some
people see trouble, others don't.

-- 
Jim Hague - jim.hague@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Work), jim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Play)
Never trust a computer you can't lift or you don't control.

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