Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!att!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Batch mail or batch uucp
Message-ID: <6108@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 27 Jul 88 19:30:55 GMT
References: <2345@sugar.uu.net>
Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 34

In article <2345@sugar.uu.net> karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) writes:
>A program, uubatch, runs before uucico is going to do a poll.  It finds files,
>maybe pairs of files, destined for that system, and it takes all the ones that 
>are smaller than some limit, say 30K, and they're batched up into a file with 
>cpio and then queued as a file and job to the remote system with the remote 
>program being uu_unbatch or something like that.
>
>uu_unbatch then dearchives everything and uuxes it all.
>
>The sender may need to unbatch the batch again if it can't deliver it in order
>to bounce the jobs individually.  No doubt there's other nasty stuff as well.
>
>What do you think?  I am not a great uucp hack, so I don't know how viable or
>hard this is.  It doesn't *look* all that hard, but hey.

Could be as simple as using cpio |compress  to batch the files, with the
reverse to unbatch.  I do this with a lot of files ahead of uux, then
uux the unbatching command.  Possible problems are the directory ownership
if cpio creates new directorys running under uux, and the fact that cpio
(up to SysVr3 anyway) doesn't return an error status if it can't write all
the files.  Doing this automatically ahead of all uucico traffic should work
as well, but it will involve some new problems:

Do you want to delay outgoing calls to allow a batch to accumulate?
What about incoming calls?  Maybe uucp and uux should become (different)
front-end programs that generate the bundle (in which case an archiver
like zoo that can add to an existing file might work best).  Personally,
I think a better solution would be a streaming protocol for uucico that
doesn't wait for acks except at the end of the connections when all files
would have to be acknowledged to consider the transfer complete.  This
would also work nicely over satellite links and do away with the need for
protocol spoofing where there is a turnaround delay in the modems.  

Les Mikesell