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From: geoff@pmafire.UUCP (Geoff Allen)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: Re: Why not just eliminate all the hierarchies?
Message-ID: <817@pmafire.UUCP>
Date: 16 Oct 89 21:10:38 GMT
References: <34075@looking.on.ca>
Reply-To: geoff@pmafire.UUCP (Geoff Allen)
Organization: WINCO Computer Engineering, INEL, Idaho
Lines: 37

In article <34075@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
advocates eliminating all the hierarchies (except for limited
distribution or other special cases).

I don't think that the anarchy that he proposes in his article is a good
idea.  But Brad has one idea that I like:

|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.

 [stuff about the virtues of anarchy deleted]

|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.

Interesting...

I think this idea's worthy of consideration.  Just how tough would
something like this be to do?

-- 
Geoff Allen
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