[mythtv-users] Mooting architecture for a DataDirect replacement

Rod Smith mythtv at rodsbooks.com
Fri Jun 22 21:54:02 UTC 2007


On Friday 22 June 2007 15:51, Dan Ritter wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 02:30:34PM -0400, Rod Smith wrote:
> > > I would expect usability would be the main hinderance with NNTP.
> >
> > Why? The idea is not (I presume) to force people to use news readers like
> > Leafnode, Knews, or Pan to download listings. The idea (as I understand
> > it) is to incorporate a specialized NNTP client into MythTV, or to be
> > called by MythTV.
>
> Well, you could start by installing Leafnode and having your
> client scan the automatically received messages; that would save
> having to write an NNTP client. Not that that's difficult, it's
> just already done.

Leafnode is a simple NNTP server that uses NNTP client protocols to transfer 
messages to and from a (typically) more powerful NNTP server. It wouldn't add 
much benefit to run Leafnode in addition to whatever NNTP solution is 
incorporated into MythTV (if indeed this path were taken).

If, OTOH, you're suggesting using Leafnode as the mechanism for downloading 
the relevant newsgroups for MythTV to peruse, IMHO that would be overkill. 
Although Leafnode is simple by NNTP server standards, it's much more complex 
than is required for this project. For instance, it includes message posting 
and NNTP server features that wouldn't be needed for this application. It 
would also almost certainly download more data than is needed (depending on 
how the newsgroups were structured), cache it for longer than is needed, and 
require more configuration than is desirable. There's also the potential for 
problems from accidental access, particularly if it were misconfigured -- an 
accidental attempt to access one of the big binary newsgroups could cause a 
lot of unnecessary data transfer and consume a lot of disk space.

NNTP is a simple enough protocol that there shouldn't be a problem in either 
writing (or finding already-existing) code to scan a few newsgroups' 
messages, download specified headers based on that scan, and download 
specified message bodies based on the headers contents.

-- 
Rod Smith
http://www.rodsbooks.com


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