emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) (06/01/90)
what I want to do is something like this. say you are following something that currently is discussed in multiple newsgroups, but not any one of them in particular. I want to set up some filters within the news batching and unbatching software that takes all articles which meet certain criteria (akin to what you might match in a kill file or a keep file) and create a new "newsgroup" out of them. I think I can do it given the current C news batching/unbatching scheme like so. for point of illustration let's say I'm looking for anything to do with lex, yacc, or bison or any other compiler building tools. I figure that if I search comp.unix.*, comp.lang.*, comp.compilers, and gnu.* I'll probably hit everything. First, an entry in the sys file queues up a bunch of articles in likely target groups. YACC:comp.unix.all,comp.lang.all,comp.compilers,gnu.all/world:F:\ yacc-articles/togo next, the moral equivalent of an unbatcher looks at this file of articles, greps each one for the magic strings, and writes out another file of article names which should be reconstituted into the new group. perhaps, if it gets a full feed of possibly interesting groups, it could parcel them out to a number of different synthetic groups. another thing comes along and takes the list of articles and the new newsgroup name and quietly drops articles into the new group. you might call this ex post facto crossposting. this is potentially tricky. I'd be inclined to either hard link or symbolic link the article into the new directory and update the active file, but -- do you update the history file as well? it's not clear that there's an easy way of sending these articles out to downstream sites -- nor would you want to in most cases. if you did you'd want to generate new message-id's too & rewrite some headers. expire might also be tricky depending on how many people are reading the synthetic group -- one reasonable application of this would be to save useful postings in otherwise trashy groups. thus you could expire hard on the unfiltered group and be looser with the synthetic one. I want this sort of thing to meet these needs: comp.archives, so I don't have to hunt through every group for stuff -- it would be damn nice to have it all dropped in one place for me. several synthetic comp.windows.x subgroups; also synthetic comp.sys.sun subgroups based on the moderator's existing work. thanks for any input (or of course, working code....) --Ed Edward Vielmetti, U of Michigan math dept <emv@math.lsa.umich.edu> comp.archives moderator
zeeff@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us (Jon Zeeff) (06/01/90)
Sounds like a good idea - support for virtual moderated newsgroups. You get an article from somewhere (maybe even via mail) that contains a list of article ids. The news software looks up all the articles and creates links to put articles in this virtual group. You could just delete the current history entrys for the articles and add updated ones. Very handy for creating "suggested reading lists" (sort of a moderated group that doesn't suffer from some of the distribution problems). You would have to do something about references to articles that arrive before the article does (like save and reevaluate the references once in a while or have the person/thing sending them out relist the articles several different times). I suppose you could do everything in the newsreader (ie, it would make a single article containing article ids appear as a real group) but that may be more complicated. Anyone working on something like this? It would certainly resolve many of the moderated/unmoderated arguments. -- Jon Zeeff (NIC handle JZ) zeeff@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us I found a groundhog chewing on my car!
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (06/02/90)
In article <EMV.90May31175714@urania.math.lsa.umich.edu> emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) writes: >... I'd be inclined to either hard link or symbolic link the >article into the new directory and update the active file, but -- do >you update the history file as well? If you want expire to delete those new links for you, you'd better update the history file. Remember to do proper locking. Updating history will be expensive, given how big that file is. If you want rn and the other news readers to mark those articles "read" in all groups after you read them in one, you'd better update the Xref headers in the articles too. Otherwise, it's a bit strange but it sounds workable. -- As a user I'll take speed over| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology features any day. -A.Tanenbaum| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu