From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npoiv!alice!sjb
Newsgroups: net.news
Title: Re: News system proposal
Article-I.D.: alice.1468
Posted: Sun Feb  6 11:36:46 1983
Received: Mon Feb  7 00:35:06 1983
References: sask.205

A few replies to your 'news system':

1) One directory containing ALL articles -- Congratulations!  You have
   just reinvented A news!  The basic flaw (and it's pretty nasty) is
   that this scheme causes extremely looooong directory lookups when
   news is searching for articles.  That's why B news puts every newsgroup
   in its own directory.

2) One ngfile -- Again, you've just recreated A news.  B news' approach to
   an active file AND an ngfile is neat:  The active file shows what groups
   are available to read and in what order they will be read.  The ngfile
   shows which groups can be posted to LOCALLY, thus you can prevent people
   from accidentally posting to fa groups by !'ing out fa.all in the ngfile.

3) One history file per group -- This has its advantages and flaws.  I would
   like to see some discussion about making a /usr/lib/news/history directory
   and then giving each group its own history file by group name in that
   directory.  This would speed some things up a bit, since expire would
   not have to plow through a huge history file every night.  However, I
   would think the extra time spent finding, opening, and closing each file 
   would also slow it down.

4) A sequencer type thing -- Now you're making notesfiles.  Why should news
   record the last time a person read each group rather than the list of
   articles read in that group.  If it takes the former approach, then people
   would not be able to skip over articles for later perusal (e.g. I see
   a long article on a topic I like while at work; not wanting to 'waste'
   company time/money reading and responding to it, I save it until that
   night or the weekend, when I can devote my full energies to it.  With
   a sequencer type thing, I'd have to go looking through all of news
   again.  The way it is now, B news just shows it to me again automatically.)

In general, it appears to me that you're regressing to past, dark days.
Most of the stuff you propose (numbers 1, 2, and 4) would slow news
down considerably and make it much more clumsy to use.  Number 3 has
very good merits, and I think we should discuss it some more and see
what can be done with it.