Newsgroups: news.software.b Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Cnews strikes again? - Re: newgroup comp.lang.sigplan Message-ID: <1989Aug6.042101.11845@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <1989Aug3.112451.21772@nc386.uucp> <1631@stl.stc.co.uk> Date: Sun, 6 Aug 89 04:21:01 GMT In article <1631@stl.stc.co.uk> "David Wright" writes: >It appears that doing what for B news is an innocent command to create a >news group locally will, with C news, send that newgroup control message to >the entire net... people used to B news's more civilised >default control distribution of 'local' keep getting caught out by the >different behaviour... >I know that they believe C news doesn't have to be completely compatible >with B news, but in this respect IT REALLY DOES. Unfortunately, B News disagrees with itself on this. 2.10 did indeed send to the entire net; the restriction to local posting came with 2.11. (No, 2.10 is not dead, there are quite a few of them around still.) B News does *not* have "more civilized default control distribution"; *some versions* of B News have it. There is *no* single behavior that is "the way B News did it", and C News *cannot* be completely compatible no matter what we do. The purpose of inews is to post news. It is irrational to have it do local system administration which does not involve posting, and indeed we have an "addgroup" command which does the job of purely-local creation. One function, one program, the way Unix does things (or did, back when its development was controlled by people with taste). Unfortunately, a lot of people can't read documentation, it seems. Geoff and I are considering what to do about this; our current feeling is that the right way out is simply to make "inews -C" print an error message (mentioning "addgroup") and terminate. This, or some variation if we think of a better approach, will be in the next patch. -- 1961-1969: 8 years of Apollo. | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1969-1989: 20 years of nothing.| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu