Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cbmvax!snark!eric From: eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: High Volume Calls For New Approach Message-ID: Date: 22 Dec 88 16:42:19 GMT References: <26469@bu-cs.bu.edu> <952@dlhpedg.co.uk> <2145@imagine.pawl.rpi.edu> <766@auspex.uucp> Organization: First Zenarchist International Lines: 23 In article <766@auspex.uucp>, guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) writes: > The other problem is that the referencing article can (and, at times, > does) arrive before the referenced article (assuming the referenced > article arrives at all). Netnews articles are datagrams. Too true. I am working on a solution to this problem. The first part, already implemented in beta 3.0, stores the reference IDs of 'orphaned' child articles in special stub entries in the history file. Thus when the parent article arrives, the orphan IDs can be filled into a 'Back-Reference' header for conversation-following. The second part, not yet implemented, will enhance ihave/sendme for a true distributed fetch capability, allowing references to a missing parent to be optionally translated to a sendme request to some set of 'close neighbors' presumably connected over a high-speed link. In particular, the Internet would become a set of 'close neighbors', permitting the news volumes of the entire Internet to be accessed as a self-organizing distributed database. The step after that, of course, is 'HyperNews' -- full distributed hypertext... -- Eric S. Raymond (the mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews) Email: eric@snark.uu.net CompuServe: [72037,2306] Post: 22 S. Warren Avenue, Malvern, PA 19355 Phone: (215)-296-5718