Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!network!ucsd!brian From: brian@ucsd.EDU (Brian Kantor) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: NNTP vs Cnews (was: Re: Cnews is not for me) Message-ID: <1895@ucsd.EDU> Date: 13 Aug 89 06:06:48 GMT References: <2828@ndsuvax.UUCP> <1989Aug12.221624.12153@utstat.uucp> <1894@ucsd.EDU> Reply-To: brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor) Distribution: usa Organization: The Avant-Garde of the Now, Ltd. Lines: 32 Approved: brian@ucsd.edu Supersedes: <1894@ucsd.EDU> Geoff's model of the interface between CNews and NNTP is correct if you have only one NNTP feed, but it does not correctly address the environment that I and some of the other internet news administrators have - we each have multiple NNTP news feeds which are CONTINUOUSLY delivering news articles. If we were to batch those articles and then process them periodically, we would have wasted significant amounts of network resources transferring duplicate articles. (BTW, our goal is to thus cut the average news propagation delay from hours to minutes, if not seconds.) For example, I am often offered the same article from tut, ucbvax, and rutgers within a minute or two of each other. Had I not posted the article when I first got it, I'd have accepted and transferred two redundant copies, which is a waste of network and temporary disk space. As it is, I occasionally accept an article that I'm already in the process of receiving from another site, but luckily that window is small. Cnews is a good thing. But it has one or two assumptions that don't fit the environment in which some of us live. And so we have to change it. Free software is often like that. After all, you didn't pay to have it customized for you. And remember that Cnews was developed at a site that was (so I'm told) primarily uucp-connected at the time that the design and major development was done. Besides, you can steal some of the really good ideas from Cnews and retrofit them into Bnews if you want - that way you get a news system that you already understand with some of the really nifty improvements that Geoff and Henry have come up with. Brian Kantor UCSD Postmaster & Chief News Weenie brian@ucsd.edu BRIAN@UCSD ucsd!brian