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From: rpw3@redwood.UUCP (Rob Warnock)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: the answer to the net.sources garbage
Message-ID: <185@redwood.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 6-Mar-85 21:31:06 EST
Article-I.D.: redwood.185
Posted: Wed Mar  6 21:31:06 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 9-Mar-85 07:28:34 EST
References: <1356@t4test.UUCP>
Distribution: net
Organization: [Consultant], Foster City, CA
Lines: 78

+---------------
| ... I'm chewing up so much diskspace trying to archive this stuff.  Egads!
| ...Why not use a moderated newsgroup for sources?
| It seems silly to have hundreds of people throughout the world spending
| hours weeding out their net.sources archives...
| Chip Rosenthal, Intel/Santa Clara
+---------------

While "mod.sources" would help if everybody switched over, I have
another method that might be useful until the millenium arrives.
Instead of archiving junk and then having to weed it out, let your
own local readers act as the "moderator" of what gets archived.

That is, nothing gets archived unless somebody ASKS for it to be
archived (doesn't have to be the sysadm.) Since presumably SOMEBODY
reads net.sources regularly, all the "good stuff" will be seen at least
once before it expires.  It could also pick up "really good stuff" from
other groups than net.sources, keeping people from saving multiple
copies of large articles in other groups.

Implementation:

Since the environment variable "$A" is set to the full-path of the article
during shell escapes (at least from "vnews"), a simple "!newsarch" shell
script can be used to record peoples' desire to keep an article around.
(Yes, it's deliberately a long name, both to avoid clashes with other
names and to discourage archiving everything.) One (possibly TOO simple?)
implementation of "newsarch":

    : 'newsarch - make a note of reader interest in a news article'
    exec echo User: "${USER-$LOGNAME}" File: $A >>/usr/spool/net/arch.request

A little hacking with "awk" and "sort -u" and "ln", and VOILA! -- you
have your "moderated" archiver. A little more work on "newsarch" and
you can warn folks if articles from a certain group aren't "allowed"
to be archived (of course, they might just end up "saving" them, which
doesn't help your disk any). The "User:" stuff helps keep track of
who saves what, if you need to for administrative reasons. (Obviously,
for more security one makes "newsarch" a setuid-news C program.)

(Actually, since "redwood" is mostly a single-user site, I cheated and
did it even simpler for myself. I use the script "varc", shown below,
since as I "archive" stuff I also want to file it into catagories by
name.  The tree /usr/spool/file/... roughly maps to the newsgroups that
get a lot of filing activity. News catagories are created on-the-fly
with "!mkdir <catagory>;varc <catagory>/<savedname>", etc. The use of
"ln" means that I get warned of name conflicts.)


Rob Warnock
Systems Architecture Consultant

UUCP:	{ihnp4,ucbvax!dual}!fortune!redwood!rpw3
DDD:	(415)572-2607
USPS:	510 Trinidad Lane, Foster City, CA  94404

====== Attachment: /usr/local/varc =====================================

: varc - 'hack to archive articles from within news (actually vnews).'
# Totally specific to system "redwood", which has /usr/spool on a
# separate filesystem.
#
# Since the "s"(ave) command works from vnews, there is no reason to
# worry about saving the article anywhere else but in /usr/spool/file,
# since I can always type "s foo" for elsewhere...
#
# Assume the article is currently available in the environment as $A...
case "$A" in
"")	echo 'No $A in environment! (*burp*)'
	exit 1;;
esac
case $# in
1)	: o.k.  ;;
*)	echo 'usage: varc pathname'
	exit 1;;
esac
ln $A /usr/spool/file/$1	# let "ln" complain about further problems
ls -l /usr/spool/file/$1	# just for a warm feeling