Re: OT Re: First general purpose unmoderated newsgroup for Debian
begin Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org> dedi ki:
> On Wed, 01 Sep 2004, Kirk Strauser wrote:
>> On Wednesday 01 September 2004 07:01 pm, Travis Crump wrote:
>>
>>> I don't mean the latency of posting->post appearing, I mean the
>>> latency of clicking a subject and seeing the body. For e-mail the
>>> latency is roughly equal to a hard drive access since fetchmail
>>> fetches my mail in the background.
Your PC would carry the whole NG instead of the messages you're interested
in. In the long run you would have two choices: Either set up a rather
short expiry period (which would clear away the messages you might like to
keep longer), or have a rather bloated inbox (or appropriate folders)
which would stretch access time to disk, perhaps to the point it would
take downloading it from the net. A third option could be setting up
separate expirations and filters for each folder (list), separately
marking each message you like to keep longer, and generally putting up
with a galore of unnecessary toil.
OTOH, with an offline news reader you can download all the headers, mark
the ones you would like to read offline, get online and download the
marked messages, then read and reply to them offline. Quite efficient.
Additionally you would have cached only the messages you have deliberately
downloaded. So you could set a really long expiration period, and still
you would have quite a light and fast message cache.
>> So install Leafnode and use that as your local server.
>
> In which case he might be better off with email anyway.
Right. Also I would prefer to use the right method in the first place,
rather than try to circumvent shortcoming of a wrong method.
>>> For usenet, it is equal to a network access as the body
>>> needs to be fetched from a usenet server. I suppose that you could
>>> pre-fetch all the bodies, but that would negate one of the 'benefits'
>>> that the post I was reponding to mentioned.
This is so with online news readers (like KNode). But with an offline
reader (like Mozilla or Pan) you don't have to prefetch all the bodies.
>> I take it you're using POP3 to read your email. IMAP works basically
>> the same way as NNTP, so there's no clear win either way.
Is it possible to work offline with IMAP? I.e. download headers, mark
some, than get the ones marked for download.
> And if you use a new Cyrus IMAPd (no, I didn't upload a package of it
> yet), it also accesses the same thing :-) You can access the same spool
> using either NNTP or IMAP. And get messages into it using either NNTP
> or LMTP. So all your email and netnews sit on the same place.
This may be a clever solution. But it is awkward to employ a server just
to be able to circumvent limitations imposed by using wrong tools for the
task at hand. NNTP is specifically designed for threaded discussions, and
it has all the bells and whistles inherently needed for the task. Whereas
with mail one has to twist and bend to get somewhere near.
In a nutshell I see this whole "mail lists for public discussions" thing
like this: A teaspoon can be used as a screw-driver, and a screw-driver
can be used to mix a cup of tea. But what is the point?
--
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