🚀 go-pugleaf

In news.software.b, article <C1I4Mu.Hn7@zoo.toronto.edu>,
  henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
> In article <fYnlXJc@quack.sac.ca.us> mrapple@quack.sac.ca.us (Nick Sayer) writes:
> >According to my recent testing, the recently posted 'freeze' program
> >yields a gain of 5-10% in compression on batches of USENET news over
> >plain old compress...
> 
> The new GNU "gzip" program is supposed to do considerably better.  (It may
> also be faster; "freeze" is really slow, which may matter if CPU cycles
> are a significant issue.)  I'm debating how to handle this in C News; I
> really, really do not want to have to maintain an ever-growing list of
> magic numbers inside newsspool.

Either use the m! XYZZY header as a handy excuse to call programm XYZZY
(if present in a special directory, for security reasons) with the rest
of the file on its stdin, or tell your feed to send gzipped data to
zrnews, compressed data to crnews, frozen data to frnews.

I'm more a friend of the second method; IMHO, it's the most direct way
the sender (who already knows the packing method) can tell the receiver
what to expect. No need for the receiver to go through contortions trying
to find that out.


-- 
Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you're at it.
-- 
Matthias Urlichs  --  urlichs@smurf.sub.org -- urlichs@smurf.ira.uka.de   /(o\
Humboldtstrasse 7 -- 7500 Karlsruhe 1 -- Germany  --  +49-721-9612521     \o)/