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From: karl@dinosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups
Subject: Re: Changes to Alternative Newsgroup Hierarchies
Message-ID: <KARL.89Jul23183041@dinosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 23 Jul 89 22:30:41 GMT
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In-reply-to: mike@unmvax.cs.unm.edu's message of 23 Jul 89 20:51:09 GMT

mike@unmvax.cs.unm.edu writes:
   These were originally mailing lists run off prep.ai.mit.edu.  Since
   the number of readers was getting rather high, the prep folks asked
   the various people getting the mailing lists if they would work
   together to create a PRIVATE distribution to save load on prep.  With
   the great help of people at Ohio State, this was done, and
   tut.cis.ohio-state.edu became a bi-directional gateway for gnu.*

This is not too close to what happened, really...

The gnu.* newsgroups are considered to be, even now, echoes of the
still-existing mailing lists.  Every gnu.* group, with the exceptions
of gnu.config and gnu.test, has a mailing list equivalent.  The GNU
folks did not ask that a newsgroup hierarchy be created; rather, Bob
Sutterfield got inspired in the shower one morning, irritated by the
volume of GNU mail in his personal mailbox, and decided that turning
it into news would be a Good Thing.  It was, I understand, with some
difficulty that the GNU folks ultimately accepted the idea In The
Large.  RMS still gets all things GNUish as mail, not news.

There is also still some argument going on about continuing the
gateway, because of the _large_ number of misguided, flammable, and
generally distracting postings which manage to creep into all corners
of gnu.*.  Where the GNU lists were once strictly technical, "tight,"
and highly informative, now they are cluttered with nonsense that ends
up in the wrong newsgroup (especially bug reports in the higher-level
group), random queries show up everywhere (notwithstanding comments in
almost everything GNUish that gnu@prep.ai.mit.edu is the address for
generic requests), and flame wars show up from time to time, e.g.,
gnu.gcc a couple of months back and I suppose gnu.emacs right now
(though I haven't seen gnu.emacs since early last week).

It has been suggested that a gnu.something-or-other be created in
order to provide a home to the flame wars.  This will probably happen,
but it will be most unfortunate; this will encourage the Dark Side of
the character of Usenet, specifically the approval of flaming.
Whenever Usenet grows up (which is to say, never), flaming will stop.
Until then (which is to say, forever), foolish people will post
inappropriate verbage in inappropriate newsgroups at inappropriate
times, ignoring the charter, background, and intent of the gnu.*
hierarchy.

--Karl