bstempleton@watmath.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (05/29/83)
I disagree strongly with the article suggesting people truncate their subjects. Keep your subjects long folks! Perhaps notes will then fix their bugs. I know these are design bugs rather than implementation bugs, but that is no excuse at all. Now that the rest of the usenet is going over to a standard article formath, notes should: 1) Use standard headers, thus get rid of short subjects, the annoying - (nf) appended on the subject and that crap at the front of an article. Few sites these days have the news design bug that strips unknown headers. Surely the backbone sites don't have it at least. 2) Once this is done, allow notes and news to keep their articles in the very same file, perhaps as links if different directory structure is required. B news even tells you now where it put the article. -- Brad Templeton - Waterloo, Ont. (519) 886-7304
jim@uw-beaver.UUCP (06/01/83)
I talked to Ray Essick at the University of Illinois, who wrote the
notesfile system, a while back about the news to notes interface. He
wrote the interface a long time ago (as usenet goes) and doesn't have
the time to work on it now. Isn't there anyone else out there who runs
notes and would be willing to put the effort into bringing the
interface up to the current standard?
I trust Ray won't mind my reproducing this exchange here.
From: Jim Rees <jim@uw-beaver>
Subject: Some suggestions to make notes friendlier
To: essick@uiucdcs
I am very impressed with notesfiles. It is far superior to readnews
for reading the news. But although the user interface is nice, the
interface to the news system leaves much to be desired.
My main complaint has to do with handling of the "References:" field.
Notes doesn't generate one. Our news system (not vanilla readnews)
depends on this field to match up followups to what you call the base
note. If the field isn't there, we get the equivalent of an orphaned
response. As you know if you've ever used readnews directly, these can
be pretty annoying. I find it ironic that one of the big advantages of
notesfiles, its ability to keep base notes and followups together, is
lost to users of news when the followup comes from a notes system.
Not only does notesfiles remove the important base note info from
followups, it inserts its own distracting info into the body of the
article. This shows up as two lines of garbage at the beginning of
every article:
#N:uiucdcs:23300026:004:2035
uiucdcs!essick Apr 25 14:00:00 1983
Can't these be put into the header as a special field? For example,
they could be turned into:
Notes-Header1: #N:uiucdcs:23300026:004:2035
Notes-Header2: uiucdcs!essick Apr 25 14:00:00 1983
and put in with the rest of the header. Then they could be easily
weeded out by news reading programs. I realize that this might create
compatibility problems with old notes systems, but I think it is a
little unfair of you to drop my reference information then expect me to
pass yours along.
Why are subject lines shortened so much by notes? It is a little
annoying to me to see a subject field something like this:
Subject: Re: Need a foo bar adaptor for my Unix version - (nf)
If the reference info was available, this wouldn't be much problem,
because I could just look at the subject of the base note. But the
reference info is lost, so I don't see the subject field except in its
truncated form.
Whew! I didn't mean to be so long-winded. If you've gotten this far,
my thanks for reading. I look forward to your early reply.
Jim Rees
University of Washington
>From ihnp4!parsec!uiucdcs!essick Tue May 10 11:29:44 1983
To: parsec!ihnp4!uw-beaver!jim
Subject: Some suggestions to make notes friendlier
Thanks for the suggestions; the notes/news interface is
probably the most ``hacked'' part of the package.
Back when I was writing this stuff (fall '81/spring '82),
the only news software I had was A-news. Of course A-news left
many things to be desired, including the lack of extra header fields.
Going from news -> notes isn't too hard. Since I used the
`A' format, all that needed doing was to parse some well-defined
fields.
Going from notes-> news was tougher. My first problem was with
the article id's; notesfile article id's are longer than the news
id's. This is because each notesfile has it's own "unique integer"
counter and the system wide article id had to include the name of
the notesfile (actually another "unique integer"). A-news and
B-news both didn't like id's longer than 14 characters so I tried
base conversion and stuff. Neither program liked that so I gave up
and tried a separate header line.
A-news gateways should pass header lines (since they wind up
in the body of the article). B-news didn't pass unknown headers
when I worked all of this out. Bummer. Since all sorts of
bad things (duplicate articles and such) would happen if one of
these articles crossed a B-news system that dropped the extra
header line, I stayed with the information in the body of the
article.
Probably the most "correct" thing to do is to rewrite the
notes/news gateways. But I don't have the time....
When I first started the project, articles were limited to
19 lines of 79 characters, there was no networking, and we were
trying to make it fit our local environment (11/40, small disks,
not much spare CPU time, big penalty for opening/closing files).
You can see what has happened to it since then.
If I had my 'druthers I would rewrite the entire package,
figuring that you always throw the first one away. I've even
drawn out some of the data structures for a new implementation
(as opposed to a modification to the current one) which address
some of the problems that both news and notesfiles have run across.
I don't know when/if I will ever do this; there are other things
that I want to do and still more that my research advisor wants me
to do.
My recent work with the notesfile code has been to consolidate
what I have. I don't think you can beat the code in an environment
what I have. As a development tool (team-communications, log-keeping,
etc.) it is tough to beat. It is also very good in small subnets
of USENET. We use it exclusively here and have no problems around
campus (about 15 Unix machines running the code). Adapting the current
code to a large net (like all of USENET) is going to be tough; it
will be easier to write something new which combines the advantages
of notesfiles for structure and the parts of News that make it work
well in the large environment.
Enough for now, I really should be off studying
for my finals. I always appreciate constructive criticism and
try to incoporate good suggestions into the code. If you hae
any ideas, I'll listen to them.
-- Ray Essick, University of Illinoishal@cornell.UUCP (06/02/83)
One more small suggestion for notesfiles.
Those of us who use readnews regularly see the subject "orphaned response".
I think this is inserted by notes when it sees a reply to an article that
has not yet appeared. Modifying the subject, however, means that the article
no longer contains a useful title, which is not helpful. If notes is ever
fixed up, it should retain the title specified in the original note or
followup to help news readers filter out unwanted stuff.
Hal Perkins
uucp: {decvax|vax135|...}!cornell!hal
arpa: hal@cornell