Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!bbn.com!rsalz
From: rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz)
Newsgroups: news.software.notes
Subject: Re: Evolutionary dead end?
Message-ID: <276@fig.bbn.com>
Date: 28 Dec 87 15:38:03 GMT
References: <107300003@datacube>
Organization: BBN Laboratories, Cambridge MA
Lines: 19

Bob Berger asked if notes is an evolutionary dead-end.  I think so.  Too
bad, because (at least for local groups) the interface is hard to beat.
(For Usenet-wide newsgroups, rn is best.)  Part of the reason for this is
that it goes against one of the main tenets of the Unix philosophy -- a
basically-text database is stored in binary form.  This means things like
heterogenous NFS sharing takes great pain.

If notes is to expand and grow, it's gotta leverage off the work everyone
else is doing for regular netnews.  The best way for this to happen is
for someone to write a "newsnotes" program that reads articles in the
/usr/spool/news/comp/sources/unix/123 scheme, but with the aide of the
special index file /usr/spool/news/comp/sources/unix/.nnindex to create
things like the index page and time-sorted basenote/response chains.

If anyone's interested in such a project, I'll help chit-chat, but I'm
already way too overcommitted.
	/r$
-- 
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