From: dawson@willard.UUCP
Newsgroups: alt.bbs,comp.bbs.misc
Subject: Re: Re^2: BBS Standards Committee Formed (mine)
Date: 26 Aug 92 02:38:36 GMT
Article-I.D.: willard.2ie4PB2w165w
Organization: Willard's House BBS, Atlanta, GA -- +1 (404) 664 8814

peter@global.hacktic.nl (Peter Busser) writes:

> dawson@willard.UUCP writes:
> 
> >greenie@drycas.club.cc.cmu.edu writes:
> 
> >> Yes yes yes those are all fine and dandy...
> 
> >Last I looked, disk space for PC's was (and I'm sure still is) MUCH less
> >expensive than the same space for Unix or VMS platforms.

> And last time I looked, PC's (that is IBM-PC's) were able to run UNIX. Don't
> say that UNIX is expen$ive, it's not. Just get yourself a copy of Linux (just
> ftp it from tsx-11.mit.edu or nic.funet.fi) and see if it meets your needs.
> Tune in on comp.os.linux for more information.

Yes, I know.. I wonder who on the Usenet has NOT heard of Linux or BSDI by now?

> >Not that that has ANYTHING to do with message header definitions.
> But it's a sily debate because:
> 
> 1. MooSe-DOS uses 2K-4K clusters whereas UNIX uses 512byte blocks. That means
>    that a 1500 byte large message (which is typical for my FidoNet system,
>    which has a *.MSG message base) wastes 500-2500 bytes as it always fits in
>    one cluster. The same message would waste only a few bytes on my Linux
>    machine.

My whole point, but not quite exactly.  I was under the impression that most
PC BBS systems do not store messages as in a single-message-per-file format,
but rather in a database of some more sophisticated means of disk space
management, and I felt that the post to which I responded was actually
referring to this distinction.

Any BBS that keeps its messages or conferences database in an indexed flat file
would have improved disk space characteristics over even the best Unix file
system.  If one takes that one step further and compresses the actual contents
of the message (requiring a dedicated reader, of course), then the size of the
message database will have been significantly reduced.

This is, in point of fact, the exact scenario for several MS-DOS (and other
OS's) bulletin board systems.

[ Many bytes of refuting what I consider to be the "wrong" straw man... ]

> Conclusion: the debate about ASCII headers is very very silly. While we are
> looking through a microscope to a few bytes, the system wastes many hundreds
> of K's without anyone noticing it.

It's not a debate about ASCII headers, but about storing any (every?) byte of
                              ^^^^^^^
the message as straight, uncompressed text.

> >greenie@drycas.club.cc.cmu.edu continues:
> >
> >> (Just so that no one think's I'M uninformed, our company develops software
> >> both PC's and DEC VAX/VMS systems...)

> But not for UNIX aparently. Any ISA/EISA 386 that is capable of running OS/2
> is capable of running Linux. Linux is a free UNIX clone for the 386 and up. I
> is in beta stadium, but don't let that fool you, it is very stable (it passed
> the crashme test), complete and easy to install and use.

Ah, yes.  This <statement/rebuttal> does lead me to suspect that your
interpretation of <greenie@drycas.club.cc.cmu.edu>'s post is actually the
correct one.

However, if my thesis is at all correct (and nothing the Bleeding BBS Standards
Committee has said leads me to this assumption), then there could be some work
done to align storage methods, which would mean minimal work left to do in
order to share networked conferences/newsgroups.  If each little BBS has its
own idea of a native BBS database, then there would obviously need to be a
common transport mechanism.

Garsh.  What about UUCP/NNTP?  Even if each separate BBS system has a different
concept of what the message database resembles locally, why should there be
any work at all left to do with sharing messages?  It is most definitely a
task that should be left to the implementors of (your BBS name here) to effect
a utility that converts outgoing messages to the required form necessary to
work with the existing transport mechanisms.  There's no call to go off and
create a NEW transport standard.

-- 
dawson@willard.UUCP (Willard Dawson)
Willard's House BBS, Atlanta, GA -- +1 (404) 664 8814