Xref: utzoo news.groups:13225 news.admin:7218
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: Why not just eliminate all the hierarchies?
Message-ID: <34075@looking.on.ca>
Date: 16 Oct 89 04:16:00 GMT
Organization: Looking Glass Software Limited, Waterloo ON
Lines: 54
Class: misc

It would be a lot simpler, perhaps, to eliminate all the hierarchies that
don't serve some special purpose.  (For example, local hierarchies like
the "can" in can.politics indicate not just a Canadian group, but a group
about Canadian politics.)

To do this you eliminate the news "sys" file as a means for feeding
sites.   Instead you give each site a .newsrc like file, with some special
entries indicating which new group creations are passed along.

When it comes time to feed, you run a program (which I could write fairly
easily) that prepares a list of all articles "unread" by the destination
system, which is then fed into the batcher.   Add/subtract groups as you
like from this .newsrc file.

New group creations work more interestingly.  When the program encounters
a newgroup control message, it checks to see if it is posted to
some special pseudo-groups for group creation.  We can have as many of
these pseudo-groups as you like.  What newgroups a site gets then depend on
what philosophies of group creation a site follows.

For example, you might wish to only create groups that were created according
to the guidelines with their votes and all.  So such newgroup messages
would be issued with a pseudo-group (or codeword if you prefer) indicating
that they came from a guidelines discussion.

Some sites might be willing to take any newgroup that comes from a trusted
benevolent dictator.  You could pick me, or Gene, or anybody who did this
sort of thing, and you could pick as many of 'em as you liked.

Or some sites might be willing to take any group that meets one of the
above criteria and also has a 'hierarchy-like' codeword on it.   Ie. a
site could agree to take only "comp" groups that are approved by the
guidelines (or a czar etc.) if they want.

That's what anarchy is about.  Let more than one solution be used, and
let the individual sites pick the one that they think works.

-------------

After that a neat trick is possible.  You have a program on your system
that 'ors' together all the .newsrc files on your system, your client
systems, and the .newsrc feeding files of the sites you feed.  Each
day you send this 'or' to the site that feeds *you*, where it is used
to create the feeding .newsrc file for your site.

What this means is that the day somebody on your system subscribes to a
group, it starts feeding to your system (unless you explicitly prohibit
the group.)  Likewise, when you, and everybody downstream has unsubscribed
to a group, it *stops* feeding to you.

Instant fully dynamic distributed network with no waste requiring little human
intervention.
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473