Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!blake!ndsuvax!nctingue
From: nctin...@ndsuvax.UUCP (Mark Tinguely)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Cnews is not for me
Message-ID: <2828@ndsuvax.UUCP>
Date: 12 Aug 89 05:37:46 GMT
Reply-To: nctin...@ndsuvax.UUCP (Mark Tinguely)
Distribution: usa
Organization: North Dakota State University, Fargo
Lines: 26
Maybe, I had too high of expectations for Cnews, or possible Cnews is designed
for batching systems (and we run as an nntp only site). In any way you look at
it Cnews is NOT for us.
An article must first run though a script file (inews) which immediately calls
another script file (which goes through all kinds of space worries -- by our
indications a typcal news article is 2K bytes long, does the disk free have to
occur on every file? how about doing this once an hour or so!). The saga
continues in an executable, which sets some things up and call yet another
script that is now prepared to do something useful.
When Cnews is working on some incoming news our system goes to hell.
Yes, I know I will be flamed by the "Cnews-ers", so I will only breifly
mention that the `readnews, `checknews', and `postnews' were so poor, that
they were the first files to go. Now I am spending a few hours of the week-end
to correct the damage of a week with Cnews.
ps. I hated NN also, but that is another tale.
--
Mark Tinguely North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105
UUCP: ...!uunet!ndsuvax!nctingue
BITNET: nctin...@ndsuvax.bitnet
INTERNET: nctin...@plains.NoDak.edu
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!utstat!geoff
From: ge...@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer)
Subject: Re: Cnews is not for me
Message-ID: <1989Aug12.221624.12153@utstat.uucp>
Organization: Statistics, U. of Toronto
References: <2828@ndsuvax.UUCP>
Distribution: usa
Date: Sat, 12 Aug 89 22:16:24 GMT
Mark, you are looking at things the wrong way, perhaps due to prolonged
exposure to B news. First, you don't have to choose between B news and
C news, you can run them in parallel. Second, you aren't using our
nntp stuff, so it's hardly fair to blame C news for your
misconfiguration: nntp should not be invoking inews for every article,
it should be producing an input batch and eventually invoking newsrun.
Thirdly, perhaps you might in future do us the courtesy of consulting
us with your problems by mail before flaming in public and making
yourself look bad.
--
Geoff Collyer utzoo!utstat!geoff, ge...@utstat.toronto.edu
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: he...@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Cnews is not for me
Message-ID: <1989Aug13.002845.28018@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <2828@ndsuvax.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 89 00:28:45 GMT
In article <2...@ndsuvax.UUCP> nctin...@ndsuvax.UUCP (Mark Tinguely) writes:
> Maybe, I had too high of expectations for Cnews, or possible Cnews is designed
> for batching systems (and we run as an nntp only site). In any way you look at
> it Cnews is NOT for us.
> [efficiency woes with feeding every article through inews]
This is why we included fixes for NNTP for batching. There is NO WAY to
make news handling really efficient unless input is batched; with our NNTP
fixes, NNTP C News is a lot faster than NNTP B News ever was. We cannot be
responsible for what happens if you install only part of our software.
> An article must first run though a script file (inews) which immediately calls
> another script file (which goes through all kinds of space worries -- by our
> indications a typcal news article is 2K bytes long, does the disk free have to
> occur on every file? how about doing this once an hour or so!)...
If you are confident that nothing else ever eats up space suddenly, and that
news throughput is slow enough that it can't get itself in trouble in the
space of half an hour, this would be reasonable. Neither of these is true
in general. (In particular, I assure you that C News can get itself into
deep space trouble in half an hour if it's properly installed.) I thought
long and hard about less frequent space checking, and couldn't find a safe
way to do it.
> ... the `readnews, `checknews', and `postnews' were so poor, that
> they were the first files to go...
As we have clearly and repeatedly stated, they are provided only as a
minimal user interface for people who have nothing else. If you have
superior alternatives that suit the needs of your users, you *should*
delete ours. We've never claimed they are good, only that they are
simple and workable.
--
V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry he...@zoo.toronto.edu
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