Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Cnews is not for me
Message-ID: <1989Aug13.002845.28018@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <2828@ndsuvax.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 89 00:28:45 GMT

In article <2828@ndsuvax.UUCP> nctingue@ndsuvax.UUCP (Mark Tinguely) writes:
> Maybe, I had too high of expectations for Cnews, or possible Cnews is designed
> for batching systems (and we run as an nntp only site). In any way you look at
> it Cnews is NOT for us.
> [efficiency woes with feeding every article through inews]

This is why we included fixes for NNTP for batching.  There is NO WAY to
make news handling really efficient unless input is batched; with our NNTP
fixes, NNTP C News is a lot faster than NNTP B News ever was.  We cannot be
responsible for what happens if you install only part of our software.

> An article must first run though a script file (inews) which immediately calls
> another script file (which goes through all kinds of space worries -- by our
> indications a typcal news article is 2K bytes long, does the disk free have to
> occur on every file? how about doing this once an hour or so!)...

If you are confident that nothing else ever eats up space suddenly, and that
news throughput is slow enough that it can't get itself in trouble in the
space of half an hour, this would be reasonable.  Neither of these is true
in general.  (In particular, I assure you that C News can get itself into
deep space trouble in half an hour if it's properly installed.)  I thought
long and hard about less frequent space checking, and couldn't find a safe
way to do it.

> ... the `readnews, `checknews', and `postnews' were so poor, that
> they were the first files to go...

As we have clearly and repeatedly stated, they are provided only as a
minimal user interface for people who have nothing else.  If you have
superior alternatives that suit the needs of your users, you *should*
delete ours.  We've never claimed they are good, only that they are
simple and workable.
-- 
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