Re: [leafnode-list] local groups, use as archive

[phil hunt <philh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 12 Feb 2001, Matthias Andree wrote:
> phil hunt schrieb am Sonntag, den 11. Februar 2001:
> 
> [archive]
> > > Your newsreader should do that.
> > 
> > Why do you say that?
> 
> Because it allows full control over what posts you want archived. With
> server-side archiving, you can set up filters, but that's the
> administrator's job -- and as such, it's orthogonal to what leafnode
> aims at.
> 
> It's feasible, and a full-archive does not require much code changes,
> but it's not as flexible as a newsreader-archive as in Gnus/Emacs, for
> example. Press * and it's archived.

That's obviously easier than using leafnode. (I don't use gnus; I
find the user interface a little too quirky for my liking. At the moment
I'm using slrn -- possibly i might change to a GNOME or KDE newsreader in
the future.)

I was mostly thinking of auto-saving posts that I have made. 
Auto-saving others would be nice as well. One aspect of leafnode is
that because it doesn't have an interactive GUI interface, it'd be a bit
difficult to use it to tell it to archive a particular post. (OTOH my
leafwa tool is intended to eventually be an easy-to-use interface to
leafnode, so if leafnode gets an archiving facility I could always
add a user interface to it in leafwa).

> In-place. After Server expiry. No
> need to remember where you stored it.

And if the suddenly PHB decides you have to use a Windoze box? Or
you decide to use a new newsreader? Or imagine where leafnode is
being used in a small network environment, like in an office.
(Of course then you might not want other people looking at your
archived posts).

> > On what grounds is an architecture where the newreader archives the posts
> > better than an architecture where the local-newsserver/news-cache 
> > archives the posts?
> 
> That's an implementation issue. The overall code quality in leafnode is
> not good, particularly, error detection and propagation leave much to
> desire.

I find the leafnode code hard to read; C functions spanning hundreds
of lines are not to my taste.

> > I would have thought the latter was better, because if the newsserver
> > allows the archives to be accessed by nntp, you can still look at them
> > if you change newsreader.
> 
> That's a valid point, but then again, I haven't seen Unix newsreaders which
> would use a proprietary format other than "one article per file" or one
> of the common mailbox formats. Not sure about Windows clients. Someone
> with decent software here (!= Outlook) who can comment?

Two I've used -- Agent and Turnpike -- both use proprietary formats.
Another one, KA9Q for DOS, used what look like a mailbox format 
(though that program is hardly ever used now).

-- 
***** Phil Hunt ***** 
"An unforseen issue has arisen with your computer. Don't worry your silly 
little head about what has gone wrong; here's a pretty animation of a 
paperclip to look at instead."
         -- Windows2007 error message



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