🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <24001@elevia.uniforum.qc.ca> alain@elevia.uniforum.qc.ca (W. A. Simon) writes:
} According to a document published on the net a few weeks back, a
} full news feed taken at UUNET would fill a CD-ROM in 18 days. 

I was under the impression a CD-ROM holds something like 600 MB.  If so,
then a full feed from UUNET would fill it in under 11 days actually.

The followup by Curt Welch <curt@oasys.dt.navy.mil> contained several
good points about the rest of the posting.  I'll try to expand on a
few other items here.

} A full feed is not readable by any one individual.  Too often,
} sysadmins request complete feeds, just in case.

While UUNET provides a lot of full feeds, we provide even more partial
feeds.  Anyone who pays for their feed (whether it's connect time or
just the cost of the call) will trim the feed back when their budget
can not support a full feed.  Many sites operate with this in mind
from day one.

} Another reason for full-feeditis is that news
} configuration gets real simple or, reverse side of the same coin,
} micro-management of the sys file is a pain in the spooler.

That's BS and I feel qualified to say so since UUNET probably does the
most management of sys/newsfeed files (we have three).  The management
gets difficult based on the frequency you make changes, not the size or
number of feeds.

Here comes my main reason for this posting.

} I find it surprising that no system, of the public domain news
} distribution products I have seen so far, permits dynamic
} updating of ~news/sys files at the feeder sites, by the feedee

The main thing keeping people from doing this (assuming both parties
wish to) is authentication of the request.  If I could be sure that
only the proper user(s) at a site had the ability to change their feed
then I could do this at UUNET.  Ultimately this requires some sort of
key server though.   Watch for more on this :)

} I heard that such mechanism was available in a commercial
} product (Dynafeed for ClariNet?).  Isn't it time to give the
} concept wider exposure?  Does anyone know how it is done and how
} [un]practical it is?

Note that dyamically updating the sys file is quite different than
everything Dynafeed does.  Dynafeed does allow you to control what
groups you receive from the site fed and to some degree even the
articles within the group, but Dynafeed uses a completely different
method of feeding which I do not believe is efficient enough to be used
on a large scale.  Sites running a number of such feeds are encouraged
to comment.

Both the concept of a dynamic feed and changing a newsfeed from the
site fed are good ones, but they'll need a lot of work before they make
it into mainstream news transport packages.
-- 
James Revell	Network Services Mgr   <revell@uunet.uu.net>   /8^{~