Xref: utzoo news.groups:13356 news.admin:7257
Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: Re: Why not just eliminate all the hierarchies?
Message-ID: <35290@looking.on.ca>
Date: 18 Oct 89 04:50:17 GMT
References: <34075@looking.on.ca> <817@pmafire.UUCP>
Reply-To: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 28
Class: discussion

In article <817@pmafire.UUCP> geoff@pmafire.UUCP (Geoff Allen) writes:
>
> [stuff about the virtues of anarchy deleted]
>

Don't knock it.  It's what USENET really is.  (Actually a minarchy, as it
relies on laws from the real word to form the basis of society.)  You
may not like anarchy, but do you like pretend democracy?

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

Not hard, in that I've already done most of it.  The newsclip language,
which I give away to my customers, can do all the .newsrc feeding stuff
and quite a bit more.  It's not likely that the whole net would
adopt a commercial package, but I might make a give-away stripped down
version (or somebody else might) if it is desired to go ahead with this.

As for 'oring' .newsrc files, arbitron already does that, it's not hard
to do.   You need some extra work to get the .newsrc files from nntp
clients -- alternately you could have NNTP log all groups requested
and use that as the base of what you need.

The only real new thing is the control message handling.
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473