grading in uucico

[Piet Beertema]

<...>

Consider the following problem: you want to frequently exchange mail
with a site, but you don't want to place too heavy a load on your
system by exchanging news (especially when batched) in the same sessions.
So you want to exchange news only e.g. during nighttime.

In fact uux (and uucp) already provide you with the basic feature to do
so, viz. by using the grading option '-g'. So you can already assign
different grades to mail and news files, but all that uucico does with
that is send the files in the sequence determined by the grading. So
what's needed next is to add a grading option to uucico too, so it will
transfer only files upto a certain grade. This has been implemented in
the European EUUG uucp distribution, but as far as I know in no other
uucp software, including the honey danber version. The only problem
here is that the option used for it ('-p') is inconsistent with uux
and uucp. The reason is that '-g' is used in all sources for starting
up the kernel packet driver when in g-proto debugging mode. But as far
as I can tell no one really ever uses the kernel packet driver. And it
seems that in the honey danber (will it ever be distributed?) version
'-g' has been thrown out altogether.

Questions are now:
- are there other sites that feel the need for such an option?
- would you prefer to use '-g' for it or something else?

Furthermore I would like to make a proposal:
One day the version as we run it here clashed with some other version,
that had taken '-p' for other purposes. In order to avoid such problems
in the future I would suggest that before anyone starts to use some
as yet unused option he should post/discuss it on the net.
BTW, I took unix-wizards to post this article to, since I know of no
other group for this purpose; net.bugs.uucp is the only alternative,
but that should really be reserved for bug reports. Suggestions?
net.uucp? net.uucp.announce?
-- 
	Piet Beertema, CWI, Amsterdam
	...{decvax,philabs}!mcvax!piet