Xref: utzoo news.groups:13373 news.admin:7261
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!purdue!haven!umd5!hans
From: hans@umd5.umd.edu (Hans Breitenlohner)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: Re: Why not just eliminate all the hierarchies?
Message-ID: <5487@umd5.umd.edu>
Date: 18 Oct 89 21:11:14 GMT
References: <34075@looking.on.ca>
Reply-To: hans@umd5.umd.edu (Hans Breitenlohner)
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park
Lines: 25

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.
 >-- 
 >Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473


This might be doable for those sections of usenet which are tree-structured.
For any set of host which are more richly connected it will fail -- once
a group makes it into the 'needed' list will stay there forever.  A much
more complicated scheme would be needed, which keeps track of who needs
what, or which ages newsgroup names as they are passed from host to host.
This is analogous to the problem of distributing network routing information.