Xref: utzoo news.admin:6354 news.groups:11067 Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!giza.cis.ohio-state.edu!karl From: karl@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups Subject: Re: Changes to Alternative Newsgroup Hierarchies Message-ID: Date: 24 Jul 89 13:36:39 GMT References: <7429@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <5202@ficc.uu.net> <1641@uw-entropy.ms.washington.edu> <5205@ficc.uu.net> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Followup-To: news.admin Organization: Ohio State Computer Science Lines: 84 In-reply-to: peter@ficc.uu.net's message of 23 Jul 89 12:56:24 GMT peter@ficc.uu.net writes: > But, this fact notwithstanding, they should abide by the > Spirit of UseNet, Yes, I think so. These groups have all the signs of being newsgroups. Not mailing lists... newsgroups. Not a local group, but a global newsgroup. I suggest that this outlook has managed to avoid occasional forays by RMS himself into the attempts to get people to post things to The Right Places, especially bug reports to bug-related groups. The reasoning given typically revolves around the right set of people seeing the right type of mail; the gnu mailing lists are no small items even now, and sending bug reports to the info-* lists is rude and foolish. I don't pretend to any special authority. ... Let's see... group creation guidelines. Rules for interacting with the Usenet community. Uh, huh. I don't have to pretend; I am. There is exactly one group creation guideline: Matching a new newsgroup with a mailing list. That's it. Note carefully the correlation to mailing lists. I didn't ask anyone if they thought it was a good idea to newgroup gnu.bash.bug; I just did it, because Len informed us that Brian Fox was releasing bash to beta test, hence bug-bash was coming to life. I didn't need anyone's permission, because I, as sysadmin of tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (with Bob), *am* permission to do so. Len, Bob, and I do these things. No one else does. Even *alt* doesn't allow private rantzines. gnu.* != alt.*. Thank goodness for small favors. This is not to say that I am especially fond of the politics that are constantly finding their way into the gnu.* groups; I have at times unsubscribed from the entire gnu.* set out of frustration with what happens there. But insofar as the groups have a specified purpose for existence, we who run them can do as we see fit. This change (yes, change) in the gnu.* charter... Peter, this is silly. From the first paragraph in the alternative hierarchies article (the part that _didn't_ change this month): "gnu.all" is a set of newsgroups that are gated bi-directionally with the DoD/NSF Internet mailing lists concerned with the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation. The fact that they are gatewayed with the lists indicates (rather clearly to me, apparently not so to others; I suppose that is why the textual change was made) that the groups are to be run like the lists. The additional text this month is nothing more than a restatement of the original text. That is, it could have as easily been stated as (originally), "the lists/groups have a purpose." Now (with additional text), "violation of that purpose is considered very impolite." I think the second, additional part is kind of QED, hence redundant. They're not mailing lists. They are distributed as newsgroups, listed in the alternate newsgroup posting, and show up all over the country wherever people are liberal or careless in their sys files. There is no attempt made to monitor or to control distribution. If it's not in your sys file, you don't get it; things land in junk at worst. People who are careless with their news software installation deserve no sympathy. And it has been a while since Bob last sent out a Dist: gnu sendsys, but it has been done from time to time. We are in fact quite interested in the extent of their distribution. It is perhaps unfortunate that Brian Reid's arbitron stats tell us so much about distribution; it has rather hindered our desire to put up with the trouble of using sendsys more often. (Len studiously forwards relevant stuff from the aggregate stats article to Bob and myself as well as a couple of other folks.) The fact that you don't _see_ monitoring or control indicates nothing more than that the monitoring and control are being done well enough that it doesn't intrude on you. -- I think that everyone's brains get scrambled one way or another. --Killashandra Ree