wls@astrovax.UUCP (William L. Sebok) (01/15/85)
As a peripheral issue to stargate and phone news transmission, maybe it
is time to get an efficient version of the ihave/sendme feature of news
working properly. I have never understood why the list of articles under
consideration could not be transmitted in the body of one big control article
rather than the headers of a bunch of little ones.
I know ... why don't you do it yourself. Aside from the usual fact that time
is in short supply for me right now, I would have trouble justifying working
on it now as our site only has one news feed.
It would be nice to at least keep this under consideration in some future
distribution of the news software.
--
Bill Sebok Princeton University, Astrophysics
{allegra,akgua,burl,cbosgd,decvax,ihnp4,noao,princeton,vax135}!astrovax!wlswls@astrovax.UUCP (William L. Sebok) (01/19/85)
To briefly review the subject: > As a peripheral issue to stargate and phone news transmission, maybe it > is time to get an efficient version of the ihave/sendme feature of news > working properly. I have never understood why the list of articles under > consideration could not be transmitted in the body of one big control article > rather than the headers of a bunch of little ones. Having a decent ihave/sendme protocol in news would become all the more important if one gets news from stargate and also has a regular news feed (to fill in the things that stargate doesn't carry). I've done a little bit more thinking about the subject. Suppose there exist two new control messages: "ihaveit" and "sendmeit". Both of this control messages contain a list of article id's in their bodies, suitably bounded by delimiter lines. These are new cmsg names so there is no confusion with the old ihave/sendme control messages. Only the two news neighbors sharing this protocol need recognize these control messages rather than the net as large as each message when received by a news neighbor is processed by that neighbor and not forwarded. One possible way to way to generate "ihaveit" control articles requires no modifications to rnews. It looks much like a outbound batched feed. An "F" entry in the sys file creates a list of article file names. A program run periodically by cron then can use this file to generate the ihaveit control article. However this would run more efficiently if inews were modified to generate (with some option other than "F") a list of article id's rather than a list of file names. When rnews receives "ihaveit" it looks at history and generates a "sendmeit" control article which it returns to the sender. This should be a fairly straightforward modification to rnews to implement. Finally, when rnews receives a "sendmeit" it forks a program that is essentially the present batcher, except that it uses article id's rather than file names. Actually it could use the present batcher by turning the list of article id's into a list of file names, which is written into a temporary file that is passed to the batcher. There should probably be a security check here on what sites to which one responds to this request. -- Bill Sebok Princeton University, Astrophysics {allegra,akgua,burl,cbosgd,decvax,ihnp4,noao,princeton,vax135}!astrovax!wls