Newsgroups: news.admin
Path: utzoo!sq!msb
From: msb@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader)
Subject: Re: proposed new distribution category
Message-ID: <1989Sep23.012427.8789@sq.sq.com>
Summary: Don't. Breaks existing distributions.
Reply-To: msb@sq.com (Mark Brader)
Organization: SoftQuad Inc., Toronto
References: <757@uvaarpa.virginia.edu> <4379@ncar.ucar.edu> <285@van-bc.UUCP> <4386@ncar.ucar.edu> <642@ccssrv.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 89 01:24:27 GMT


| Only the original suggestion was for a "distribution" not a new news
| hierarchy.

> IMHO, "distribution" is (or should be) nearly orthogonal with "hierarchy".
> The former specifies where the article should go.  The latter is supposed to
> say something about the content.


Exactly.  And this new proposal wants to specify a DIFFERENT thing about
the content; not the topic area but the degree of commercialness.
So it would be orthogonal both to distributions AND to hierarchies.

To make this plainer -- if the proposal was implemented, as proposed, as
a distribution, how would you post such a commercial article to U.S. sites
only?  Right, you couldn't.  People who underuse the existing distributions
sometimes forget that they exist, but they do, they work, and this would
break them.


I must also complain about the remark about

> the (small) effort involved in creating it

Yes, it would be a small effort for a news administrator to add the new
distribution to the sys file.  But getting all the news administrators
on the entire net to do it is not a small effort -- it's a major fuss,
with articles in news.announce.important and who knows what else.
Many news admins do news things only when they have time to do them,
miss announcements, and so on.


-- 
Mark Brader			"Great things are not done by those
SoftQuad Inc., Toronto		 who sit down and count the cost
utzoo!sq!msb, msb@sq.com	 of every thought and act."  -- Daniel Gooch

This article is in the public domain.