Aharpo.282 net.news NET.news utzoo!duke!chico!harpo!jerry Wed Jun 17 18:51:52 1981 comments on new netnews This is comments on the item describing the new netnews being written by ucbvax!Onyx:glickman I like what was suggested but have some questions/comments. I don't consider any of these critical and would be happy to get a version with only the changes that have already been announced. What about the protocol for avoiding retransmission of long items that a system already has? There was discussion of this in netnews a few weeks ago. Is the expiration date global or local. I think there is a need for both. Some items (such as announcements of meetings) have a natural expiration date that should be global. Others such as fa.sf-lovers have no natural expiration time but each system probably wants to use some cancel them after some fixed time. We cancel them after three weeks. I know some systems cancel them after one. An expiration date is clearly a good idea but doesn't solve the problem of global cancellation of items that the author wants to have removed. I have implemented a '-e' option that works like '-a' except it selects items earlier than the date (perhaps it should be -b for before, -b becomes available when there is no bitmap). I use this mainly to search for items to be cancelled. A little more flexibility in who can cancel items would be convenient. How about anybody in the same group as "netnews", or a compile time option that lets anybody cancel anything. In any event fix the header file so that there is one #define for the superuser and another for the user who is permitted to cancel. A way to force rebroadcast of some collection of items might be useful. What I have in mind is repositories of info. E.g. a net.groups group that contained an item describing each newsgroup could be established. Then when somebody new joined the net a neighbor could broadcast to the new machine all the items in that group. There are probably other uses. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.