>Mail and news is usually stored on your ISP server in relatively
>simple, ``traditional'' text file formats with no wierd non-ASCII
>characters and such, as found in yarn folders -- e.g., Unix mailbox
>format, and rmail format.
Do the news servers store by group?
I thought that servers stored only a single copy of a
crossposted message, like Yarn does. (Just assuming here.)
>I dont really see an advantage to packing news/mail into a SOUP format,
>if you already have a version of Unix on your PC. I guess it is that
>``Tower of Babel'' problem again -- finding common formats that various
>programs will all understand.
Ignoring the mail portion of Yarn for now, it seems the
news handling chores are divided into three fairly distinct
areas:
storage
transport
reading/posting
In creating a Yarn-like tool for *nix, it would seem
advantageous to start with an existing news server for the
storage and transport and build on that.
The reason for using SOUP or any other alternative
transport would be to run something like UQWK with all its
advantages, such as preselecting the articles to be
retrieved, zipping them all up, and running on the host's
processor. All that would be needed then is a way of
coverting the SOUP packet back into a format that speaks
NNTP to the local host.
One good reason to build on existing news base software
(besides that it would save a lot of work) is that it would
be inherently muti-user in real time, unlike Yarn which I
don't believe allows two users at once.
Steve Washam
(who was never used either Linux or UQWK, yet)