Re: lu-news and LWN

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

In message <7uzpdaoyw5.fsf@rdnzl.eklektix.com>, lwn@rdnzl.eklektix.com writes:
>It was good to read some of the messages that gave a background for your
>talk about a centralized news service.  We have two concerns: 1) that the
>system not be overly complex for what it needs to achieve and 2) that it
>give clear benefits over existing methods.  For example, what is wrong with
>the use of comp.os.linux.announce and how will the new system resolve the
>problem?  Without these, I fear we would start something that would become
>yet-another point of dissemination instead of the primary one.
>
>That said, I'm now subscribed to lu-news and I'll look forward to
>discussing the possibilities with all of you.
>
>Take care!
>
>Liz Coolbaugh
>cool@lwn.net

To address #1: I very much agree. If I can't come up with a good solution
that is simple to implement and use, then, well...we'll try to come up with
something else. :) My current goal is to come up with a relatively simple
nntp-based news thing to run in the background, and nobody has to care about
it. Each site could write its own scripts (or use standard ones that we
write) to turn spooled news into whatever it is they usually serve to the
public. This means that the news sites don't need to revamp their websites;
they simply have another source of news at their fingertips that is
presorted and preformatted.
In any case, even if this whole network thing fails, I think the
standardized format for storing/describing news is a benefit by itself.
This would give each news site a good "universal language" to communicate
news in. If nothing else, we can whip up a script that goes to each website
and builds its own list of news from that site (that solution doesn't address
the issue of making submissions easier, though, nor the issue of redundancy
between servers).

As for #2: there are several issues there. First of all, cola doesn't get
all the news that it ought to, and it gets some that it shouldn't (but
that news shouldn't just be ditched). With a system of categories, then
cola could get the news that it wanted, pre-sorted. Second of all, cola
is a pile of unformatted messages. It could use some better organization,
particularly if we're trying to increase the number of articles. Better
organization of the messages would also lead to better archiving and
searching abilities.

There are some more general advantages, such as more comprehensive
archiving, and in particular easier submissions -- a new small company
announcing that it has ported its typing tutor program to Linux really
shouldn't be forced to track down a half dozen sites, and then submit its
news piece to each of them separately.
 
Anyway, see http://linuxunited.org/projects/news/news_proposal.html under
the "Why LNP?" section for a more coherent answer to this. :)

Thanks for your reply,
--Roger