Re: Xana-project

[Roger Gregory <roger>]

Since netnews is my standard reference source
of nearly infinite data, it has been on the list 
for a long time.  In fact we have been archiving
news on tape for a few years.  Also Yound Minds
is making the complete netnews archives available
on CDRoms, I think it takes about 8.

The hack John Walker used to read mail into 88.1
would almost work for netnews, the problem is incrementaly
updating the indexes.  I was intending to write
a version which was slightly more general, but
I don't expect that to be until the c++ backend starts
going to disk.  Then we will need a lot of linked data.  
A problem is that the included text in messages should 
really be resolved into vcopy or quote link references, 
and that is a slightly harder problem.

Eric Raymond who is writing the new version of netnews
was working on a hypertext version of netnews.  The last
time I talked to him about it, that part was put on hold
till the normal version comes out.  Hyper-netnews (the
pd stuff Raymond is working on) would have more hooks for 
us to use in importing messages and we probably would be
able to interoperate with its servers as well.