News

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

     I am considering changes to the news software that would break any
applications that attempt to access files in /usr/spool/news directly because
news articles would no longer be stored in individual files. 

     Most of the news readers and utilities online have the ability to access
news via NNTP protocol and so can be reconfigured to work with new software. 

     I know that some of you are using binary extraction programs similar to
aub.  Some of these may not support NNTP.  Aub has some serious shortcomings,
for example, it seems unwilling to extract a file whose name begins with a '!'. 

     I am looking for some good binary extraction program that can work via
NNTP and does not have aub's shortcomings so that when we go to this new news
model and it does break some of the extraction utilities people are using, we
will have a functional alternative to offer. 

     The reason for going to this new model is that it offers substantial
improvements in effeciency and it is our only hope of keeping up with a full
feed given our current hardware, and even throwing infinite money at the
problem would only delay the inevitable. 

     If you have an extraction / decoding program that runs under Unix, works
properly, and can be configured to use NNTP to obtain the news articles; or
know of such a program please let me know.

     Thank you.