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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!mark
From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: name change
Message-ID: <890@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 21-Feb-85 00:36:37 EST
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.890
Posted: Thu Feb 21 00:36:37 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 22-Feb-85 09:23:40 EST
References: <484@digi-g.UUCP> <405@lsuc.UUCP> <597@plus5.UUCP> <603@plus5.UUCP> <604@plus5.UUCP>
Organization: Bell Labs, Columbus
Lines: 31

Well, I guess the rest of this discussion now has to be done in public.
If the reader is bored, feel free to turn it off or skip ahead.

Hokey - I don't see the connection between enhancing netnews
and maintaining a huge flat domain space.  We already have permanent
postings - namely articles with expiration dates in the future.  We also
have a facility for keeping a separate database - putting an extra
psuedo-site in the sys file, feeding the article to a program that
does something with the article text.  What we don't have is a way to
keep the same article number on different versions, or to automatically
expire the previous version when a new version comes in.  These features
only matter when you want humans to read the article using standard
netnews interfaces, and this doesn't make sense for a map.

So you could write a program to take updates from net.adm.map (or whatever)
and update the database locally.  This would give each host the ability
to optionally subscribe to the service, just by adding a line to their
sys file and installing a program.

What I don't see is how this solves the problem of a huge flat name space.
Who has responsibility for the database?  Who has the master copy?  Where
do you go if you want an accurate copy to send someone in another domain?
Who resolves name conflicts?  How do you prevent site B from changing site
A's data against site A's wishes?  What are hosts that don't get netnews
supposed to do?  That don't have the disk space to store such a huge
database?  That don't want to have UNIX directories with thousands of
files in them?  What do you do about situations where the entire 2nd
level must be published somewhere - it will be huge!  How do new sites
come on-line?  What if a machine doesn't run UNIX so it can't get news?

	Mark