NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/alt/bbs/internet/4831

Internet Message Format | 1992-12-26 | 4.4 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!ub!exucom.com!kjv
From: [e-mail] (Karl J. Vesterling)
Newsgroups: alt.bbs.internet
Subject: Re: internet newsgroup reading via .QWK packets
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 27 Dec 92 02:45:55 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Organization: ExuCom Multimedia Inc.
Lines: 132

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (August Abolins) writes:

[ Misc stuff deleted about QWK & offline USENET ]

>> does this make sense to anyone else?
>
>Makes sense to me.  But I guess the concept never crossed the unix mind.
>

    Well, there are a few things open for debate.


    1) QWK Sizes, and limits.  USENET is quite a lot of traffic
       for QWK.

    For instance, it's a lot faster for me to go through my news
with TRN and select the threads that I'm interested in and read them
on-line than it would be to transfer all of the traffic in that group
to my machine and read it there.

    With the above in mind it's also a consideration for the
slower speed modems.  If you only read what you're interested in, then
there is a lot of un-necessary information going into that QWK packet.


    2) QWK Readers, and the problems within them.

    On most BBS's I've noticed that messages and E-Mail live in
the same message base.  Whereas on a UNIX system they are independant
of each other (Thank god!).

    The QWK stuff on the UNIX side would have to differentiate
between private replies and public replies and submit them to mail, or
inews accordingly.

    With problems like BlueWave not making things private, and
other bugs out there I can't see it being stable on UNIX.


    I think that offline USENET would be an excellent idea if done
this way:

    Go into the users .newsrc, and find out what groups they're
subscribed to, and when was the last time they were read.

    Then with that information go to the *>NNTP<* server and
execute the following commands:

#Get the new news with the following:


newnews alt.bbs 921225 000000

230 New news by message id follows
<[e-mail]>
<[e-mail]>
<[e-mail]>
[ Some articles deleted ]

    Then do:

head

head
221 470 <[e-mail]> Article retrieved; head follows.
Path: exucom.com!ub!clarkson!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!hardy.u.washington.edu!jbiafra
From: [e-mail] (Ding a Ding Dang My Ding a Long Ling Long)
Newsgroups: alt.bbs
Subject: Re: *.QWK For Citidel

    This get's the header to the article.

    Then execute ARTICLE to get the body of the article.

    Then execute NEXT to go to next article.

So, the commands are as follows:

newnews <groupname> yymmdd hhmmss
<List of article message id's>
header
<List the header.>
article
<list the article>
next
<go to next article>

<repeat process till end of group>
<adjust .newsrc accordingly>


Examine the .newsrc to see which they are subscribed to.

Repeat above process for articles.

    Which groups they are subscribed to can be done by a simple
grep for : in the .newsrc.


    As for posting, use the POST part of NNTP.


    As for the argument that not every system out there is running
NNTP, this is true, but then it will take more work on the portions of
the software to traverse the directory tree, etc...  All that is
required here is a simple "popen" to "telnet <nntpserver> 119".

    Using this scheme would make it usefull to universities as
well because chances are they don't have the news stuff NFS'ed to
every machine. ;-)  Also I might add that going about it with NNTP
would allow this stuff to be compiled by anyone, and as long as they
have an NNTP server they've got no problems.

    The same could go for mail as well, just a simple popen to
port 25 in lieu of 119.

    Quite simply I don't have time to do it, nor do I think that I
would utilize it.  I just thought that I would mention my viewpoints.
Seeing as I know little or nothing about the innards of QWK, I could
be wrong.

    Please re-direct any flames to /dev/null

    In short, another standard needs to be done in lieu of QWK.
And something other than UUCP because it requires effort on the system
administrator, and a regular polling schedule.

--
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