Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: NNTP vs Cnews (was: Re: Cnews is not for me)
Message-ID: <1989Aug16.182527.24840@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <2828@ndsuvax.UUCP> <1989Aug12.221624.12153@utstat.uucp> <1894@ucsd.EDU> <1989Aug13.071802.5187@utzoo.uucp> <527@logicon.arpa> <9636@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us>
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 89 18:25:27 GMT

In article <9636@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us> zeeff@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us (Jon Zeeff) writes:
>I came to the same conclusion.  Relaynews should just be sitting there all
>all the time waiting for rnews to feed it something.

You have to think about when caches get flushed:  other things rely on the
disk being fairly up to date, and flushing everything out is a non-trivial
part of the current startup/shutdown overhead.  And there are some thorny
locking issues involved.  One aspect of it is quite fundamental:  there
can only be one relaynews running at a time if file updating is to be
done properly, and so you need a way to feed that process from multiple
sources -- this is very hard to do portably.

Could be done, but it's not quite as simple as it looks.
-- 
V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu