$Id: README,v 1.6 1993/06/09 20:26:27 flee Exp $

* Introduction.

This kit contains a drop-in replacement for nntp.el in GNUS 3.14.* and
3.15.  It may work with other versions, but definitely not with GNUS2.

This replacement is marginally faster at parsing nntp output in
general, but the major improvement is it will use the nntp XOVER
extension if available.  With XOVER, entering a newsgroup is
substantially faster: reading and parsing 600 headers takes about 3s
on a Sun-4/20 (but threading is still quite slow).

Without XOVER, this kit may not be worth it.  But it should be easy to
try it, and easy to back out from.


* Installing.

1. Copy chat.el and nntp.el to your elisp directory.  nntp.el is a
direct replacement for the nntp.el that comes with GNUS.  chat.el is
an auxiliary module needed by nntp.el.

2. Byte-compile chat.el and nntp.el, in that order.  It's best if you
use Jamie Zawinski's byte compiler, which is better than the one in
Emacs 18.  This byte compiler is shipped with Emacs 19 and can also be
found at the elisp archive: archive.cis.ohio-state.edu.


* XOVER support.

There are two types of news servers that support XOVER:

1. INN version 1.3 and later supports an overview database and XOVER
directly.

Note, there's some bug in INN 1.3 that causes the server to drop the
connection after certain XOVER requests.  If you keep getting "NNTP:
connection closed" messages when talking to INN 1.3 server, then you
probably have this bug.  In this case, you can either upgrade the
server to INN 1.4, or avoid using XOVER.  I don't know of any other
simple workarounds.

2. C News/nntpd.  C News needs to be augmented with Geoff Collyer's
nov.dist.tar.Z (available from world.std.com).  nntpd needs to be
augmented with the XOVER patch (included in this distribution), which
should become "standard" with the next release of nntpd.


* About Xrefs.

GNUS relies on the Xref: header to mark crossposted articles
correctly.  By default, the overview database does not include Xref:
information.

If you do not have Xref: data, this nntp.el will try to adapt by
grabbing the Xref: header when you retrieve an article.  This works
much of the time, but isn't perfect.  In particular, kill files and
catch-up will not mark crossposted articles correctly.

A better idea is to include Xref: data in the overview database.  For
C news/nov.dist, you need to uncomment the line in mkov.c that says:
	/* putextfld("xref", hdrp->h_xref); */
and then rebuild mkov.

For INN, you just need to uncomment the line in /news/lib/overview.fmt
that says:
	#Xref:full


* Feedback.

Send bugs, comments to:
	Felix Lee <flee@cs.psu.edu>