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From: jim@eda.com (Jim Budler)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Which should I use? B or C?
Message-ID: <1989Nov9.102613.16627@eda.com>
Date: 9 Nov 89 10:26:13 GMT
References: <1989Nov6.195132.4345@millipore.uucp> <1572@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <1989Nov8.035748.24911@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu>
Organization: EDA Systems,Inc. Santa Clara, CA
Lines: 70

coolidge@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge) writes:

} davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr) writes:
} >  I think it is safe to say that B news is a more mature package than C
} >news. It is faster. In my opinion it is harder to install on things
} >other than BSD, because it has not been worked on by as many sites.
} >That's not a complaint, just a statement of fact, it's new.

} This is true, as long as the 'It' in the second and following
} sentances means 'C News'. The first time I read it, it parsed as
} 'B News' and didn't make much sense. C news is faster, is a bit
} less well worked on, and is much newer.

I have to agree with this, completely. The parsing of the referenced 
article almost led me to hitting the f (flame) key.
Suffice it to say: I sit at a Sun386i, it has our modem to the outside
world, it runs our news software, it has our news disk. I have a
constant perfmeter display on my screen.

Under B-news the end of a transmission from my newsfeed, or unbatch of
news (I tried both methods) my perfmeter hit 100% and stayed there.
Under C-news it hits 100% for startup, then drops to 50% and stays
there. In addition, and this is subjective, I feel the total process
time is less under C-news, i.e. I spend less time at 50% CPU than I
used to spend at 100%. This last could be totally subjective. I
conclude C-news is more efficient. None of my newsreader software
even noticed the change. We use rrn and nn here.

} >  The V3 of B news will be out shortly, and it offers the same
} >performance gains as C news, although obviously not in the same places.

Shortly counts for nothing. I've been using C-news for 2 months.

} >Because it was developed on a SysV machine it seems a lot more solid
} >there than C news.

That's nice, no oppinion.

[...]

} C News has worked very well for us. I've done a bunch of tweaking
} and patching, but most of that is due to really high-performance
} nntp concerns. As a fully-functional news setup C worked just fine
} 'out of the box'. Not ever having run B news, we never had any
} trouble with old B traps such as using inews -C to create groups,
} or thinking things had to be done the B news way. I'm happy with
} C news and would recommend it for new sites (and I've even run
} it on a SYSV box with no problems, once upon a time...).

Having run B-news I think the new addgroup and delgroup commands
are *wonderfull*. Your average news admin can easily add a new local group
without sweating over a manual for a half hour. *Everything* you do with
addgroup or delgroup is by definition *local*. If you are a wizard
and want to do something more you have to build the RFC compliant
file containing the appropriate headers and information and feed it
to 'inews -h'. Elegant: regular stuff is provided for, wizard stuff
requires wizard preparation. Unlike B-news where all operations
were wizard operations.

} --John

Me:
My Opinion:

jim

-- 
Jim Budler	jim@eda.com    ...!{decwrl,uunet}!eda!jim
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