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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!floyd!harpo!ihnp4!inuxc!pur-ee!CS-Mordred!Pucc-H:Physics:crl
From: crl@pur-phy.UUCP (Charles LaBrec)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: A Thought on Newsgroup Structure (lo - (nf)
Message-ID: <1176@pur-phy.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 2-Feb-84 11:59:06 EST
Article-I.D.: pur-phy.1176
Posted: Thu Feb  2 11:59:06 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 8-Feb-84 03:16:57 EST
References: <5248@uiucdcs.UUCP> <819@hao.UUCP>
Organization: Purdue University Physics Dept.
Lines: 55

We ran notesfiles for about a year in conjuction with B news before I
threw it out the door.  While we liked the screen oriented behavior and
index page, when vnews arrived we decided we liked that better for the
reasons below:

	1) minor point--some of us disliked the 'moded' command set
	2) ver 1.3 on our 2.8 BSD PDP-11/44 constantly screwed up.
		net.sources had to be turned off because large articles
		trashed it completely.  I had to 'adb' some notesfile 
		index about once every other week to clear the NFINVALID
		bit.
	3) My major gripe was, and still is, its basic incompatibility
		with the rest of USENET.  At the time, it interfaced
		to news through an 'A' news interface.  This meant no
		"References:" header for the rest of the net, and losing
		any other header except Article-Id, date, and path, and
		even then notesfiles would lose all of the path except for
		the tailing "site!user"
	4) Its screen display was not very intelligent.  At 300 baud, I
		couldn't stand it.  Also, it was not possible to "fine-tune"
		the position of an article on the screen.  What I mean is
		that both "readnews" (through "more") and "vnews" allow
		you to scroll the screen by one line, thus enabling someone's
		code fragment to fit on a screen.
	5) Other nit-picky things like:  subject limited to 30 (?) or so
		characters,  no subject line in saved notes, not being able
		to save a note w/o a header line and a trailing "-------"
		(makes it a pain to grab things off net.sources and "sh"
		them), REQUIRING a mail router since path info is lost,
		not being able to use a simple "grep" to find something
		somewhere in notes (all notes in a group are kept in a single
		file that is read protected because of read/write access
		controls), and max note size of 64Kb (big problem for
		net.sources).  I could probably go on, if I thought about
		it some more, but these are trivial dislikes.

I guess I'll end this with a list of advantages:
	1) the index page is good, except that it is almost useless when
		trying to scan for a few new responses in a mire of crap,
		since you couldn't tell which notes had new responses.
		(Of course, the sequencer knew, but you didn't want to see
		all the new stuff).
	2) responses are kept together, along with their parent
	3) it takes about 75% the disk space of news
	4) it is possible to limit access to certain groups by user or group.
		The permissions are read/write/answer, where answer allows
		to enter a followup only, and not a new discussion.
	5) each news group can be administered by a normal user, who can
		be given "director" access (a "super-user"-like permission
		list on the specific notesfile)
	6) you can pick the order of presentation of news groups

Charles LaBrec
UUCP:		pur-ee!Physics:crl, purdue!Physics:crl
INTERNET:	crl @ pur-phy.UUCP