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From: frank@ladc.bull.com (Frank Mayhar)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Dynamic "smart" expiration?
Message-ID: <1989Dec31.201228.20374@ladc.bull.com>
Date: 31 Dec 89 20:12:28 GMT
References: <1989Dec27.033817.9953@smsc.sony.com> <1989Dec28.063932.13720@robohack.UUCP> <68634@looking.on.ca> <1989Dec29.213539.2801@utzoo.uucp> <6118@yunexus.UUCP> <1989Dec30.212935.1570@smsc.sony.com>
Organization: Bull HN Information Systems Inc. Los Angeles Development Center
Lines: 25

In article <1989Dec30.212935.1570@smsc.sony.com> dce@Sony.COM (David Elliott) writes:
>One thing I wonder about is the mechanism to use for grabbing the
>subscriber info.  You can't rely on .newsrc being used or being
>available. On our network, for example, people read news using NFS, and
>they may not even have accounts on the main news machine (they only
>need it to post).  Of course, we also have people who don't like the
>idea of being in a network, so they read news on the main news
>machine.  In other words, I don't even have a good set of rules to
>follow.

Well, if you're talking about doing it *right*, one approach you could take
would be to centralize the subscriber/subscription list.  That is, keep all
the .newsrc files in one place, for example in /usr/lib/news/subscribers, in
the form of "<subscriber name>.newsrc" or something.  Keep a copy of it in the
subscriber's $HOME directory, force them to match whenever he runs his news
reader.  For NNTP readers, the subscriber file could be something like
"machine:<login>.newsrc", and a new NNTP server command to get the subscriber's
.newsrc.

Certainly this would require some changes to the news readers, and to NNTP.
But I think it would be worthwhile, and not too difficult to implement.
-- 
Frank Mayhar  frank@ladc.bull.com (..!{uunet,hacgate,rdahp}!ladcgw!frank)
              Bull HN Information Systems Inc.  Los Angeles Development Center
              5250 W. Century Blvd., LA, CA  90045    Phone:  (213) 216-6241