Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: hacking comp.archives and anonymous FTP
Message-ID: <1990Jan11.174845.4133@twwells.com>
Date: 11 Jan 90 17:48:45 GMT
References: <10614@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu>
Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Lines: 47
Approved: bill@twwells.com

In article <10614@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu> emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) writes:
: Problem one is finding new stuff as it's announced.  Currently the
: best solution seems to be the 'gnus' newsreader, armed with a KILL
: file for every group that I care about.

I run C news here. I added a line to my newsrun script, just
before the call to relaynews, to run my own filter on the
incoming batch. This is, right now, a tiny program to just read
each message from the file and check it for some keywords I'm
interested in. It mails me the message id's for anything that has
the keywords.

For a bigger site, I'd also modify the inews script. (Being the
only poster, I certainly don't need an automatic program to catch
my postings. :-)

For a B news site, you'd actually have to fiddle with the inews
program.

Why did I do it this way? The amount of disc crunching goes way
down if you process the incoming in one big batch, which is how I
get it.

The main problem with this is that it doesn't honor cancellations
and the like, but, then again, those aren't all that reliable
anyway.

Now, the hard part is interpreting the postings. Having written a
grammar checker recently, I'm right into techniques for doing
this. I'll be giving it a whirl sometime and I'll let y'all know
how it goes in picking these things out.

: While that list is useful, it really doesn't tell you the right
: think.  Each line is an inventory of what the site has, but
: that changes rapidly and arbitrarily.  A better approach might
: be to list every package, then all the sites that carry it;
: that's straightforward enough to untangle with a little work.
: You could even regularize things some, with the "primary" site
: for a package or home of a list going first, then other archives
: in an ordering which might be meaningful.  I.e.:

I've got a format for this already defined. It isn't as compact
as yours, however.

---
Bill                    { uunet | novavax | ankh } !twwells!bill
bill@twwells.com