From: utzoo!decvax!duke!unc!mcnc!rti!trt Newsgroups: net.news Title: Re: News system proposal Article-I.D.: rti.1014 Posted: Fri Feb 11 12:40:28 1983 Received: Sat Feb 12 07:14:03 1983 References: alice.1468 Some comments on the recent Derek Andrew/Adam Buchsbaum discussion. 1. Where A news stores its articles is relevant only to its efficiency. Yes, the old way was amazingly slow. Newer versions put articles in subdirectories. They might yet get put into a dbm(III) file. The articles are accessed only by their article-id; it matters little how they are stored so long as they can be accessed efficiently. (There is also an auxiliary 'news-index' file which permits accessing articles by date, newsgroup, or title.) The point of Derek's suggestion, I think, is to allow accessing articles by article-id. For example, if I see that an article references "sri-ai.1234", I can just type news sri-ai.1234 to look at the article. This mechanism is useful only if people use 'followup' or otherwise reference article-ids. I suppose that since B news readers do not use article-ids much they have little incentive to supply them. 2. History files, I believe, are used to reject article duplicates. They are not not needed with A news since it is fast and easy to check if an article is already online. (There is a problem, however, that if an article is cancelled and then arrives again from some slower transmission path, the article would be re-inserted and re-transmitted. To block them, cancelled articles leave "stubs" for two weeks.) Tom Truscott