jpm@logixwi.UUCP (Jan-Piet Mens @ Logix GmbH, Wiesbaden) (03/23/91)
Hello, I keep hearing (reading) about Cnews. What are the main differences between Bnews (2.11) and Cnews ? Is Cnews worth installing ? Does it work if I am hooked up to a Bnews backbone ? Are there disadvantages in using Cnews to Bnews ? Thank you very much for your help. Regards, -- Jan-Piet Mens, Logix GmbH jpm@logixwi.UUCP Moritzstr. 50, D-6200 Wiesbaden ...!uunet!mcsun!unido!logixwi!jpm
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (03/24/91)
In article <1402@logixwi.UUCP> jpm@logixwi.UUCP (Jan-Piet Mens) writes: > I keep hearing (reading) about Cnews. What are the main differences > between Bnews (2.11) and Cnews ? I enclose our standard blurb on the subject. > Is Cnews worth installing ? Lots of people think so; the percentage of C News systems on Usenet is rising steadily. You'll have to make your own decision. > Does it work if I am hooked up to a Bnews backbone ? Yes, it is completely compatible at the transport level. > Are there disadvantages in using Cnews to Bnews ? See enclosed. ----------- Pros and Cons of C News, as against B News 5 Sept 1990 Pro - C News is generally much faster; in particular, processing of incoming news is 10-30 times the speed of B News and expire is faster by a similar factor. The speed of the "main path" approaches the theoretical ultimate, since it is almost completely system-call-bound and it does no unnecessary system calls. - C News gives the news administrator more control in certain ways, notably per-group selection of expiry time. - C News uses shell files wherever possible, making it much easier to change to suit local policies. - C News is much more robust against strange inputs; in particular, it avoids fixed-length buffers and so the code does not misbehave when buffers overflow. - C News includes full support for use in an NFS-based cluster of systems, with updates done centrally to avoid the problems of synchronization and locking over NFS. - C News is very careful not to overflow disks. - Although this was a slight surprise to us, we are told (by several sources) that C News seldom provokes the old System V inode bug (filesystems falsely claiming to have run out of inodes). B News encounters it constantly. - C News is fully B-News compatible at the news-reader level, so existing news-reader programs work just fine with it. (In fact, the C News distribution does not include a sophisticated reader at all; we're quite happy with existing ones and have no desire to reinvent this particular wheel.) - C News code is generally simple and clean, and there have been very few bugs reported. (Most of the patch activity has been improvements rather than bug fixes.) - For the dedicated code-basher, there is substantial documentation of C News's innards. - Apart from the requirement that credit be given, there are no restrictions on commercial use and redistribution. Con - C News is relatively new and is still evolving in small ways, so patches are more frequent than for B News. - The inews program (used for local postings but not for relaying news from elsewhere) is rather slow, which is occasionally a nuisance to posters and trips up over-simplistic attempts to gateway mailing lists into newsgroups. - C News documentation needs work and is on the sparse side for novice news administrators. (Although the latest edition of the UUCP/Usenet Nutshell Handbook covers C News, which helps.) - C News is *not* system-administration-compatible with B News, so news administrators have some relearning to do, and help and advice may be harder to find. - Occasional rarely-used features of B News are not supported or are done differently, so conversion takes some care. - The extensive use of shell files makes it difficult to port C News to non-Unix systems. ----------- -- "[Some people] positively *wish* to | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology believe ill of the modern world."-R.Peto| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry