@(#)IDEAS	1.1 6/1/89 
What follows is my ideas file. It gives you a glimse into some enhancements,
ideas, problems and work in progress for rkive. This is a minimal list but
it will grow after you send me your good ideas. :-)

1.  If a posting should replace the current entry it is the moderator's
    responsibility to Supersedes: any invalid postings.  rkive should
    be able to handle Supersedes. Currently it does not.

2.  Add Support For Multiple Archive Formats. 
    Have rkive link the files into a different archiving format.
    All articles should be storable in *as many* of the user-requested 
    formats as possible.  

3.  Add internal method of numbering the articles. A *new* method of archiving.
    If the archive is moved to a different machine running news or if the
    news subsystem is restarted from scratch on the same machine, it could
    conflict with previously archived articles in archives that use 
    Article-Number, thus producing massive amounts of duplicate archive 
    files in which the only problem is the file names.  

4.  Add a Configure.sh to handle configuration of default parameters 
    and to setup the software.

5.  Better and more extensive documentation as well as documentation
    that explains archiving in general.

6.  Remote archive BASEDIRs. This would allow the archive to be scattered 
    over multiple machines connected via a LAN.  With the use of rsh, rcp,
    etc., this should not be too hard.  It would require the configuration 
    file usage to be expanded so that the admin could specify the method 
    for storing.  (builtin versus rcp versus user supplied program) The 
    BASEDIR variable usage would also have to be expanded so that it 
    understood "machine:directory-path" formatting.  BEWARE of security 
    concerns here.... :-( A generic hook to user-defined storage 
    programs/libraries. I am wide open to ideas here... :-)
    
7.  An application that would allow retrieval requests from the archives 
    by reading the rkive.cf file to determine the location of the 
    newsgroup's archive and to retrieve packages by any of the archive
    methods.  This may end up using software like narc to actually do
    the unpacking for the requester. This too is just an idea now...

8.  An application that would allow retrieval requests from the archives 
    for patches or entire packages including all posted patches. This is
    currently in progress... :-) The mythical "random downloader" :-)

Well that's the direction I am heading... If you have *any* additional
ideas that are constructive, positive or negative (flames to /nev/dull)
I will be glad to hear from you. 

		Good luck and Happy archiving...:-)
			kent@ssbell

