I've been looking into the option of adding nntp support by adding a
new network protocol to the FileTP module, and not use external libraries.

This seems reasonable, because nntp is a simple protocol similar to
http.

A benefit of this aproach is that everything gets integrated with
mldonkey normal behaviour fairly easily.

A problem, though, is that nntp doesnt have support for returning the
number of bytes to be transfered, which the filetp module relies on,
because the swarmer needs to preallocate the amount and so on.
(there are some extensions to nntp for this, but they cant be relied
upon, even when they are implemented by the nntp server)

A simple solution might be to use the number of lines of the article,
which is known, and multiply it with the line-size of yenc articles,
which is also known, and add some padding. The padding can just be
discarded when it comes to decoding time.

NZB support could be added on top of this. Im not exactly sure how it
works, but it seems to just be an xml list of message id:s to be
downloaded.

This simple implementation ought to be enough to start with.


Comments?