Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!network!ucsd!brian
From: brian@ucsd.EDU (Brian Kantor)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: NNTP vs Cnews (was: Re: Cnews is not for me)
Message-ID: <1894@ucsd.EDU>
Date: 12 Aug 89 23:57:03 GMT
References: <2828@ndsuvax.UUCP> <1989Aug12.221624.12153@utstat.uucp>
Reply-To: brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor)
Distribution: usa
Organization: The Avant-Garde of the Now, Ltd.
Lines: 34

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

		"UUCP is dead." - Peter Honeyman, Feb 1989.