Path: utzoo!utstat!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!intercon!amanda@mermaid.intercon.com
From: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: New News (not GNU News) (was Re: Our friend, the GMT date.)
Message-ID: <1603@intercon.com>
Date: 6 Dec 89 14:59:04 GMT
References: <4364@helios.ee.lbl.gov> <14810@well.UUCP> <1989Dec3.210413.27043@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu> <56239@looking.on.ca> <1989Dec5.142032.7706@talos.uucp> <1601@intercon.com> <1989Dec6.031329.13569@utzoo.uucp>
Sender: news@intercon.com
Reply-To: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation
Lines: 27

In article <1989Dec6.031329.13569@utzoo.uucp>, henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
writes:
> Be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  [...]
> The Unix file system is not a bad way to organize a database.

This is true as far as it goes.  One thing I should probably mention is that
I'm in the position of thinking about and implementing news-style software
on non-UNIX machines, and so I tend to look twice at a lot of things such
as the organization of the article database, the active & history files,
and so on.  The article was tossed off the top of my head--it wasn't meant
as a "hit list" :-).

On the other hand, it's also possible to argue that the current newsgroup
structures and so forth are in part artifacts of using a UNIX directory
tree as a database...

I don't want to solve problems that aren't there, but I also think that it's
worth taking a second look at news on an overall level, as opposed to doing
a new implementation within existing constraints.  I also don't want to give
the impression that I think that such efforts aren't valuable, either.  For
example, I've been quite impressed by things in both Cnews and TMNN.  They
are, in fact, part of what got me started on this line of thinking.

Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation
amanda@mermaid.intercon.com
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