Path: utzoo!utstat!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!intercon!amanda@mermaid.intercon.com
From: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: New News (not GNU News)
Message-ID: <1610@intercon.com>
Date: 7 Dec 89 16:38:44 GMT
References: <1603@intercon.com> <14853@well.UUCP>
Sender: news@intercon.com
Reply-To: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Lines: 30

In article <14853@well.UUCP>, jef@well.UUCP (Jef Poskanzer) writes:
> ... it seems to me that if
> you're really interested in re-designing news from scratch, a good place
> to start would be the *interface* between the underlying database and
> the transports and readers.  If this interface was nicely specified, then
> providing alternate implementations (SQL vs. Unix filesystem vs. MS-DOS
> filesystem vs. whatever) would suddenly become a hell of a lot easier.

This is part of what I'm interested in talking and thinking about.  SQL is
a fairly obvious thing to look at, although I haven't gone into as much
detail in my napkin-sketches as you evidently have.

Another part of what I want to do is to "design first, then code."  A lot
of the current state of news (especially B news & rn) is that a fair amount
of it seems to have been approached with an attitude of "well, now that we
have these articles, what can we do with them?".  Now, for adding function
to an existing system which is effectively immutable, this is the only way
to do it.  Software like 'rn', 'newsclip' (apologies if you want weird
capitalization, Brad :-)), and NNTP show that you can do a lot with this,
but I think it's worth thinking about the actual operations before picking
an interface & representation.  I mean, what kinds of things DO we want to
do with articles anyway?  Brad's stuff about different classes of articles
is an excellent example.  To take it even further, though, why use article
sequence numbers at all?  Toss the active & history files, and have that
information be part of the article database itself...

Anybody know how Andrew deals with message bases?  or Notes?

--Amanda
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