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From: alan@servax0.essex.ac.uk (Stanier A)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: Re: Why not just eliminate all the hierarchies?
Message-ID: <2158@servax0.essex.ac.uk>
Date: 17 Oct 89 09:07:11 GMT
References: <34075@looking.on.ca>
Reply-To: alan@essex.ac.uk (Stanier A)
Organization: University of Essex, Colchester, UK
Lines: 32

In article <34075@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:
?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.

   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?

   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.


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