Path: utzoo!utstat!utgpu!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Just how useful is crossposting?
Message-ID: <48886@looking.on.ca>
Date: 17 Nov 89 06:49:57 GMT
References: <47326@looking.on.ca> <1604@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Reply-To: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 42
Class: discussion

Well I've been thinking about crossposting because I have been thinking
about moving net software to other operating systems.

Many other systems don't support links, so if you wish to support
crossposting you either have to a) waste disk space, or b) use another
file structure.

Crossposting, in many places, does more harm that good right now, which is
not to say that it doesn't have value, just that on the whole it may be a losing
suggestion.

In general this is part of an investigation into other forms the news
database could take.

The current system, one article per file in newsgroup directories, has the
merit of simplicity.  It fits into unix well, and people can come in to
a newsgroup directory and manually look around and it's all fairly easy
to deal with.

I thought of just leaving articles in their batches, and writing index files
in the newsgroups with the seek addresses and lengths.   This has a number
of advantages -- no links are needed for crossposts, you don't waste space due
to the 1K disk block (or bigger -- 4K on DOS) and best of all, unbatching isn't
unbatching at all -- you preserve the batches almost as is, so it's a very
fast process -- faster even than C news.   Plus you can play around with
compression etc.

But you break all existing readers.

With 1K disk blocks, the space wastage is about 16%.  More if you compress
headers due to the number of short articles.   But 16% isn't enough.  It's
less than 1 megabyte a day.   And a megabyte of disk space only costs about
$6, so a 30 day expire sves you $180.  Not worth it from that standpoint.

With 4K blocks, and no links, as on DOS, I would say the gain is more
serious.

In the end, I suspect the answer is the current format with some supplemental
files.  I think that's what NN does, isn't it?  Where can I get a user manual
or low-level implementation manual for NN?   (Probably look on uunet, right.)
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473