Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!oliveb!jerry From: jerry@oliveb.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre) Newsgroups: news.misc Subject: Re: Random order news Message-ID: <24193@oliveb.olivetti.com> Date: 22 Jun 88 20:06:40 GMT References: <3543@enea.se> <104@carpet.WLK.COM> <4025@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> Reply-To: jerry@oliveb.UUCP (Jerry Aguirre) Organization: Olivetti ATC; Cupertino, Ca Lines: 19 In article <4025@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> fair@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Erik E. Fair) writes: >This is a user interface problem - when the user interfaces learn >to sort by date, you win. I have thought about this and I have a suggestion. Having the user interface open all the articles in a group so that it can parse the date is too much overhead. A simple solution is to have rnews set the modification time of each article to the date in the header. It is then possible to get the article date by just stat'ing the file. Once this is done many things become practical. Asside from the news readers a utility can easily be written to sort a batch/nntp input file by article date instead of arrival time. This wouldn't be reliable for UUCP transmission but would still help even out the propagation delay. Of course some of the strange dates in messages are going to create some strange file times. But hey, that kind of thing makes usenet interesting. ("Rn won't let me read this article yet because it was written tomorrow.")