Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!phigate!nlgvax!hans
From: hans@nlgvax.UUCP (Hans Zuidam)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: regarding patch level of patch
Summary: A Usenet news kit is a *very* good idea
Message-ID: <246@nlgvax.UUCP>
Date: 19 May 89 08:35:22 GMT
References: <3eCX02wo28gL01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> <1730@fig.bbn.com>
Reply-To: hans@nlgvax.UUCP (Hans Zuidam)
Followup-To: comp.sources.d
Organization: Philips Research Geldrop
Lines: 42
Expires:

In article <1730@fig.bbn.com> rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) writes:
>In <3eCX02wo28gL01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> paf@uts.amdahl.com
>(Paul A. Fronberg) raises a number of interesting questions...  I can
>only answer a couple of them:
>>Perhaps some sort of "kit" with the commonly requested programs could
>>be send out once every few months? 1 megabyte or so a year would probably be
>>sufficient. My canidates would be news, patch, uudecode/encode, arc (or
>>equivilant), binhex, shar. In short the programs necessary to access and
>>extract news programs/articles.
>Interesting idea.  Lots of people are against it.  The information REALLY
>doesn't change all that much, and sites that are connected don't need it
>that badly (as opposed to the maps, say).  Getting "news" software is
>easy:  UUCP it from the person giving you your feed.  Then, you can slowly
>bootstrap up to the latest revisions by going to pay places like UUNET
>or free places like MCDCHG.

Some sort of "kit" would be *really* usefull. It would allow a new site
to be up and running with the correct software in no time. However, posting
such a kit every x months would be a gross waste of bandwidth assuming that
most sites are running the correct software.

When I was a (sort of) system manager at another site a couple of years
ago it was a hell of a problem just to get started. I did not know if I
had the correct software, saw people talking about patches I did not have,
didn't know if I needed them and so on. When you start with a Usenet
connection you generally do not even know what you *do* need. If you
help a new site to get online you have to dig software from all corners
of your filesystems ;-) and forget half. This takes a lot of time for both
parties involved.

A solution would be to make such a kit available on magnetic media (say
tapes or floppies) at 'major' backbones. A new site could then send a
SASE and a fee for handling costs and get it. Another (additional)
sollution is to have the kit available at conferences, say Usenix, Eunet
and the national or local ones.

						Hans
-- 
Hans Zuidam                                    E-Mail: hans@pcg.philips.nl
Philips Telecommunications and Data Systems,   Tel: +31 40 892288
Project Centre Geldrop, Building XR
Willem Alexanderlaan 7B, 5664 AN Geldrop       The Netherlands