USENIX Board Studies UUCP: Compression

[Steve Nuchia]

In article <1989Dec1.220852.7325 at utzoo.uucp> henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>This already exists:  the ihave/sendme protocol.  It's not great.  Apart
>from reliability issues, the main problem is that it slows things down
>quite a bit.

Ihave/sendme could be greatly improved if the whole history line
rather than just the article id were sent.

This would add information about the arrival time of the article
at the sending site, newsgroup list, and file name (enough info
to calculate a file name) to the ihave message.

Benefits:  The receiving site can implement an arbitrary neswgoup
acceptance policy without cooperation from the remote -- no more
remote sys file maintenance headaches.

A minor benefit (for senders with good a good dbm) is that the
history lookup can be bypassed when servicing the sendme.

A major benefit is that receivers can implement newsgroup-specific
cost optimization policies.  For instance, someone with a uunet
line and a couple of local lines could decide to order anything
in comp.all from uunet within two hours after it gets there but
wait 12 hours for other traffic.
-- 
Steve Nuchia	      South Coast Computing Services      (713) 964-2462
"Man is still the best computer that we can put aboard a spacecraft --
 and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor."
					- Wernher von Braun