Aucbonyx.118 NET.news utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!Onyx:glickman Fri May 16 10:29:40 1980 New Netnews I'm working on a new netnews. It is not ready. It is taking a lot longer that it should. I hope to have a rough version running locally this week. Initially, the major new features will be: 1) No more .bitfile, .uindex, or .nindex. Everyone has a .newsrc file in their home directory which contains a list of the articles they've already read. This will allow skipping articles and coming back to them later: random-access. The same interfaces are around: /bin/mail, msgs, and print. The -c option still works in the same way, but I'm beginning work on an improved interface with the Berkeley Mail program so that netnews will know which articles were looked at during Mail. 2) Much faster. 3) New article format. Looks like a letter. 4) Expiration dates. The "expire" program just goes around and cancels all articles whose expiration dates are older than the current date. 5) There are directories for each newsgroup in the spool directory and all the articles have sequentially numbered filenames in their directories. This system is compatible with the MH news system. 6) The netnews command is split into two commands: inews, which inserts news, and readnews. 7) Less locking! There are subtle changes, too numerous to mention here. As a reply to somebody's article last week suggesting that ucbvax isn't running a vanilla netnews: It is running a vanilla netnews. Also, the current netnews doesn't allow forwarding. That is, if a system receives an article that it doesn't subscribe to, it will just ignore it. In the new netnews, the default will be to forward all articles even if there is no local interest but via a compile option a site may choose to run it the old way to restrict traffic. I'll try to keep you posted on late-breaking developments. Matt Glickman (ucbvax!Onyx:glickman) ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.