From: mbs@adastra.cvl.va.us (Michael B. Smith)
Newsgroups: alt.sys.amiga.uucp
Subject: Re: Cnews?  Help!
Distribution: world
X-NewsSoftware: GRn 1.16f (9/26/92) by Mike Schwartz & Michael B. Smith
Date: 28 Sep 92 19:26:20 EDT
Organization: Well, I haven't decided on a name yet...

In article <1992Sep28.161549.3838@ckctpa.UUCP> crash@ckctpa.UUCP (Frank "Crash" Edwards) writes:
> mbs@adastra.cvl.va.us (Michael B. Smith) writes:
> >GRn 1.16f (the next release) has a CNEWS flag which causes the .next file to
> >be ignored. It does lengthen the time it takes for GRn to start up, however.
> >GRn 1.16g will attempt to address that.
>
> Why?  There are two possibilities, (1) you read the entire directory and
> keep the article with the highest numbered filename, or (2) you read
> the ACTIVE file and use field #2 (I think) which is maintained by the
> CNews RELAYNEWS program (I'm trying to write filenames in all
> uppercase so they can be more easily distinguished from generic
> terms).

You got it the first time -- almost.  :)

GRn maintains its own history file, a GRNRC. This contains the article number,
the From header and the Subject header for each article. GRn presents each
newsgroup in a Gadtools Listview with each article delineated and capable of
being selected and acted upon. Very similar to an mthreads database, minus
some of the sibling information that trn requires.

This is used to support the variety of sorting and threading that GRn provides.
Using a C-News ACTIVE file would save me the directory scan to find articles
that are new since the last run, but to get my required information, I would
still have to open and read each new file, as well as read the active file.

Investigation shows that switching to using ExAll() instead of the current
ExNext() will significantly decrease the amount of time required for the
directory scan.

Eliminating the reading of that information would remove what makes GRn unique
and supremely easy to use (IMO).

> If you would like, I can format the manual pages for the ACTIVE and
> HISTORY files, and provide a short synopsis on the subroutines that
> CNews uses to access these files.  CNews is, if you haven't seen the

Sure, I'd appreciate that.

> source code, very modular in design and those are routines are quite
> easy to use.  In fact, the CNews distribution has two active.c source

Yeah, I used a few small routines from it when I did the initial speed-ups
to GRn (for scanning article headers -- Geoff and Henry are properly
attributed in the GRn source :)).

> distributed the version that caches the whole file since I presumed
> that most AmigaDOS-based sites would not be full-feeds, and if they
> were they would have plenty of RAM available for unbatching).

Mike Meyer and I have gone "'round and 'round" on that. The article database
format he came up with takes about 100K on his machine, about the same on
mine. He thinks that is of acceptable size, it seems more than a little
large to me (given that a 100K batch may be in process, and a copy of the
decompressed file sitting in T:, etc. etc.).

> Why not integrate CNews in the UUCP distribution?  Matt discussed this
> with Larry Rosenman at one time, but since then Matt has been busy on
> more adventurous projects...  Perhaps it's time to reconsider this?
> In the Unix community there's talk of a "D News" version which is a
> re-write of CNews that perhaps will be available (for Unix machines)
> within 6-8 months as alpha/beta software.

I've been following, quite attentively, the discussions on news.software.b
and news.misc.tech discussing a new ACTIVE file format that meets the needs
of threaded newsreaders. Although not as threaded as trn, I need much the
same information (for GRn).

In general though, while C-News provides greatly enhanced capabilities,
there is a cost. Adminstratively, AmigaUUCP is trivial. Not true with
C-News (IMO). The setup for AmigaUUCP is trivial. Not true with C-News
(IMO). There are also performance implications.

AmigaUUCP is a PD project. Matt has not (to my knowledge) named a new
Keeper Of The Sources. I suspect that AmigaUUCP will move in the direction
that the KOTS desires, more or less.    :)

> In addition, the newsreader that I distributed with CNews has code
> which accesses the ACTIVE file already, and it may be a good
> introduction to how those accesses would look.  Email if you'd like
> the newsreader source.  Also, I have LIBCNEWS.A which is the library
> of compiled objects for Manx C; Larry was going to port/convert the
> source to be SAS-compatible (whatever that means) but again, I think
> other projects had a higher priority.

I'd like that. AmigaUUCP is currently a DICE project, and no longer will
compile with either SAS/C or Manx. GCC works OK, in most places.

I'm willing to do to GRn whatever my users request, as long as it can be
done reasonably (or has a strong benefit).
--
  //   Michael B. Smith
\X/    mbs@adastra.cvl.va.us  -or-  uunet.uu.net!virginia.edu!adastra!mbs
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