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.")