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