Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Organization of news binaries/data files wrt NFS
Message-ID: <1988Jun14.232105.7688@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <2320@quacky.mips.COM>
Date: Tue, 14 Jun 88 23:21:05 GMT

> The second part is tougher.  It's simple to set up each machine to have
> the BINDIR binaries point to the right place, but harder to share the
> LIBDIR stuff, since some of it is portable ASCII data and some is
> nonportable binary data...
> ...it would be nice if the implementors of B News 3.0 and C News
> took this into account, and had a "sharable" library and a "nonsharable"
> library.

To some degree we're ahead of you:  C news keeps the programs and the
control files completely separate.  (This was a fairly late addition to 
the alpha release, and I think it wasn't quite right in places, but it's
been cleaned up since.)

There is one nasty problem that we know of no easy solution for:  the dbm
database format is machine-specific.  If you're willing to use the dbm
file *only* during posting -- which means, for example, that your news
readers can't do lookup by Message-ID efficiently -- then this is not an
issue.  Otherwise I think everything in C news's /usr/lib/news is fully
machine-independent.
-- 
Man is the best computer we can      |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
put aboard a spacecraft. --Von Braun | {ihnp4,decvax,uunet!mnetor}!utzoo!henry