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From: lwall@sdcrdcf.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Digests (Actually using rn and digests)
Message-ID: <2808@sdcrdcf.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 19-May-86 18:54:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdcrdcf.2808
Posted: Mon May 19 18:54:19 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 23-May-86 07:19:21 EDT
References: <1143@bunker.UUCP> <6912@boring.UUCP>
Reply-To: lwall@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Larry Wall)
Organization: System Development Corporation R&D, Santa Monica
Lines: 40
Keywords: digest, rn

In article <6912@boring.UUCP> guido@mcvax.UUCP (Guido van Rossum) writes:
>...I'm going to fight digests until
>they're gone (or until rn hides the difference completely -- would this
>be possible, Larry?  I assume not w/o changing the format of .newsrc).

You assume correctly.  There are two ways to make rn deal with digests,
neither of which is nice.  One, we could redefine article numbers to look
like 123.1, 123.2, 123.3, etc.  This would not only force different notation
in the .newsrc (or some parallel file), but would also make the internal
bitmaps much harder to work with.  Two, we could treat a digest as a
sub-newsgroup, but this loses all the benefits of subject searching,
suppression, etc.  Rn really wants to see a newsgroup with a flat
"number-space", at least in its current incarnation.  The basic problem
is this: how to reserve a set of article numbers for the undigestified
articles such that those who want to read digests aren't penalized.

A simple solution with a site-by-site granularity would be to make inews
able to split digests into separate articles.  To let some of the people
at a site read digests while others read separate articles requires a little
more work.  If disk space is cheap you could have two separate newsgroups.
Otherwise you'd need to have the virtual article interface I've been meaning
to put into rn for a long time, and then the undigestified article would
simply be a different view of the internally cross-referenced digest.  More
complications to inews, however.

Nevertheless, inews is the correct place to put such complications--otherwise
you end up executing the same complicated code many times over each time
someone decides to read the digest.  We have enough trouble already justifying
the CPU costs of news without multiplying those costs unnecessarily.

Larry Wall, believe it or not.
sdcrdcf!lwall

P.S.  No, I don't have time to hack inews.  I may do it anyway, of course.
But if I do it will take me even longer to answer the 5 MONTHS of mail I
have squirreled away in my inbox.

Psychiatrist: Why did they think you qualified for this job?
Patient: I had the two primary virtues of a good programmer:
	laziness and impatience.