Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!hao!oddjob!gargoyle!ihnp4!homxb!mtuxo!mtune!codas!killer!ninja!sys1!tsunami!jthomp
From: jthomp@tsunami.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.software.notes
Subject: Re: Evolutionary dead end?
Message-ID: <84100005@tsunami>
Date: 3 Jan 88 10:05:00 GMT
References: <107300003@datacube>
Lines: 43
Nf-ID: #R:datacube:107300003:tsunami:84100005:000:1716
Nf-From: tsunami.UUCP!jthomp    Jan  3 04:05:00 1988


/* Written  9:38 am  Dec 28, 1987 by bbn.com.UUCP!rsalz in tsunami:news.software.notes */

Rich Salz sez:
> 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.

I sez:
We've done Convex-serving-Suns-and-other-Covex's-using-NFS here,
it wasn't really too bad.  Note (pun?) that these two machines
share the same byte ordering, and as such that issue hasn't been 
addressed.  (Horrors, fill that code full of 'htonl' and 'ntohl'.)

R$ sez:
> 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.

I've been thinking that a 'nntp'/'rrn' interface would be ideal.
With Rich's idea, such a scheme would indeed be thinkable.

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


I'd like to 'chat' too.  I may even be able to commit some weekend
time.

				--jim
Jim Thompson
Convex Computer Corporation
701 N. Plano Road
Richardson, Texas 75081
(214) 952-0200
{uiucdcs,ihnp4,sun,allegra,harvard}!convex!jthomp