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From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: Re: Why not just eliminate all the hierarchies?
Message-ID: <35291@looking.on.ca>
Date: 18 Oct 89 04:54:28 GMT
References: <34075@looking.on.ca> <2158@servax0.essex.ac.uk>
Reply-To: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 30
Class: discussion

In article <2158@servax0.essex.ac.uk> alan@essex.ac.uk (Stanier A) writes:
>
>   I quite like the basic idea, but there seems to be a problem. Say
>I subscribe to sci.unicorn, the first reader on my system to do do.
>sci.unicorn gets added to our system .newsrc, and next day we are fed
>sci.unicorn. But what if our feeding site doesn't get sci.unicorn yet?
>Do I not have to wait an extra day until their feeding site starts to
>feed them? And if their feeding site doesn't get it ....
>   Or have I misunderstood?

Yes, this can happen.  Hopefully you aren't more than a couple of hops
from a feed site.  With new groups it's not a problem, as all new
groups get fed before they have readers (give 'em a month's grace or so
perhaps.)   To deal with this, one could speed up the propagation of
requests, so that they happen several times a day, or have 'feed me'
changes instigate immediate messages to zoom down the line.
>
>   There is another problem. In the example above, I would only get
>soc.unicorn articles from the day I subscribe. At present, if I subscribe
>to a new newsgroup, I can read previous articles and understand the
>various threads under discussion. The loss of this facility would be
>annoying.

Annoying, but at what cost?  If you want to keep every group somebody
might want to read some day on your system, then you clearly don't
want to use a .newsrc controlled feed mechanism.  Barring some sort
of server mechanism, where you get groups you don't have via NNTP (which
is how I always thought NNTP should work) there is no way around this.
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473