Aucbvax.1826 NET.news utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!mark Fri Jun 19 13:00:06 1981 re: comments on news conversion These conversion problems have been addressed. The new news will understand articles sent to it in the old format, and a program to send articles to old format systems will exist. Converting the users and database to the new format is messy. We considered writing a program to convert everybody, but we came up with a much simpler solution: have people run the old news program to read stuff up to the date of the changeover, then run the new news program to read new stuff. The last article posted on the old system before changeover should consist of instructions to switch to the new versio (which will be called 'readnews' rather than 'news' or 'netnews'). Shell scripts to first run the old version, then the new version, can be made easily if desired. Presumably after a short time (say, a week or two) the old news can be uninstalled. This will give most people plenty of time to log in and read the old news - those who don't log in for a week (or whatever time a site chooses) will get a message such as 'netnews: command not found' when they finally do log in, and will presumably ask someone what happened. Comments on the conversion process are welcome. Mark ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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.