Path: utzoo!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!uwvax!umn-d-ub!umn-cs!thelake!steve
From: steve@thelake.UUCP (Steve Yelvington)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Just how useful is crossposting?
Message-ID: <1019891222120884@thelake.UUCP>
Date: 19 Nov 89 18:22:12 GMT
References: <49584@looking.on.ca> <47326@looking.on.ca> <1604@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <48886@looking.on.ca> <14927@bfmny0.UU.NET>
Reply-To: pwcs.StPaul.GOV!stag!thelake!steve
Organization: Otter Lake Leisure Society (MN-USA)
Lines: 75

In article <49584@looking.on.ca>,
     brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes ... 

>In article <14927@bfmny0.UU.NET> tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff) writes:
>>>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.
>>
>>Trivially untrue!?... if you're porting News over to some other system
>>where "real" links aren't supported, just write a one-line file saying
>>"-> Link to file ABCDEFG.123" and do the "link" yourself.  If this would
>>waste too much disk space, you can have ONE file of "links" in each
>>newsgroup storage area, and search that list for "linked" articles.
>
>Creating a one line file (for example, under MS-DOS where that can take 4K)
>comes under my definition of wasting disk space!   Even a 1K file
>comes under that definition.
>
>The best solution is probably a new file structure, where you simulate
>unix directories to a small extent, with files of pointers to the actual
>text.  (Or even files of message-ids, which are mapped to pointers to the
>text.)

This is the approach taken by the software I'm using right now: UUREADER
(by John Stanley) on the Atari ST, whose operating system in many ways is 
a 68000 clone of MS-DOS. News items reside in a single spool directory.
The reader maintains an index file that looks like this:

I+ <49584@looking.on.ca>
 D A0771.DF
 X A0771.XF
 N news.software.b
 S Just how useful is crossposting?
I+ <49591@looking.on.ca>
 D A0772.DF
 X A0772.XF
 N news.software.b
 S Just how useful is crossposting?
I+ <1641@stl.olivetti.com>
 D A0668.DF
 X A0668.XF
 N comp.lang.misc,comp.lang.modula2,comp.lang.pascal
 S The Olivetti Modula-3 Distribution

The I line contains a message status flag (+ in these examples) to
indicate whether the article is new/old/marked/deleted. D and X refer to
the D file and X file names, munged into a format consistent with 
GEMdos / CP/M / MS-DOS (8+3, case-insensitive).

The UUREADER collates items by scanning the Subject: fields. (In creating
the index file, multiple Re: and Re^2: strings are thrown away, so only
the root subject field is displayed.) 

** The References: line is ignored. **

The user is presented with a list of newsgroups. By pointing and pressing
a key, he/she moves into a list of subjects -- not articles. Postings on
each subject then can be read in the order in which they were received.

Crossposted items (such as the Modula-3 article in the above example) are
displayed in each of the named newsgroups, but maintained as a single file
on the disk and presented to the user only once.  When you read an item
and the status changes to old or deleted, it disappears from the displayed
message tree in each of the newsgroups.

All of this avoids the pitfalls inherent in porting B or C news and rn to
a very foreign (and in many ways primitive) system, not to mention the
problems with munged References: lines (which is another thread entirely).
And it provides what in practice is a very useful user interface.

At least it lets me kill whole threads of meta-sci.aquaria with one
keystroke. :-)

   -- Steve Yelvington, up at the lake in Minnesota        
  ... pwcs.StPaul.GOV!stag!thelake!steve             (UUCP)