jack@vu44.UUCP (Jack Jansen) (12/28/84)
(ski!jkh asks for a way to restrict news *from his own site*)
What you propose is very difficult in the current implementation,
because you don't ask for articles, you get them sent. The current
situation is that your feed says "GnaGnaGna, lets send him some
news, GnaGnaGna", and then stuffs 1.5Mb worth of rubbish down your
dialup. You can either swallow it, or suffocate in it.
A few of the disadvantages of this system are:
- If you are fed by a construction like
site1----------site2
| |
+--poor_you----+
where site1 and site2 call each other more often than you,
you get *every* article twice, and *you'll* have to discard the
duplicates.
- You cannot reuquest retransmission of an article in a simple way.
- You cannot decide what groups to receive, without bothering all
of your feeds.
And probably lots of others, if you think about it.
Probably it's about time that the protocol used to exchange news
between sites is reconsidered, especially with the stargate stuff
coming up. The current way of telling where an article should be
sent will *never* work if you decide to get some of your news via
stargate, and some via phone.
--
Jack Jansen, {seismo|philabs|decvax}!mcvax!vu44!jack
or ...!vu44!htsa!jack
If *this* is my opinion, I wasn't sober at the time.