Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: centralized .newsrcs
Message-ID: <1990Jan1.063940.681@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
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> <1989Dec31.201228.20374@ladc.bull.com>
Date: Mon, 1 Jan 90 06:39:40 GMT

In article <1989Dec31.201228.20374@ladc.bull.com> frank@ladc.bull.com (Frank Mayhar) writes:
>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.

You would have to revise a *lot* of software.  A year or two ago, Geoff
and I counted ten widely-used news readers without even trying hard.
There are undoubtedly more than that.  And the code inside some of those
is, uh, well, shall we say "stiff reading"?  It's years too late for any
substantial revision of how the .newsrc stuff is stored and handled.

In any case, I think it's wasted effort.  Monitoring of .newsrcs is useful
in precisely the situation where such convolutions are *not* necessary:
a small, simple machine with only a few users, who can be counted on to
keep up with the news.  Postulate one user who likes to read news from
time to time but doesn't do it regularly, and you're in trouble.  Any
large system will have dozens, if not hundreds, of such people.
-- 
1972: Saturn V #15 flight-ready|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1989: birds nesting in engines | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu