Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!lsuc!eci386!clewis
From: clewis@eci386.uucp (Chris Lewis)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Regional Distributions
Keywords: "remote" distributions
Message-ID: <1989Nov10.220951.22654@eci386.uucp>
Date: 10 Nov 89 22:09:51 GMT
References: <1009@umigw.MIAMI.EDU> <101@toaster.SFSU.EDU> <1023@umigw.MIAMI.EDU>
Reply-To: clewis@eci386.UUCP (Chris Lewis)
Organization: R. H. Lathwell Associates: Elegant Communications, Inc.
Lines: 34

In article <1023@umigw.MIAMI.EDU> wb8foz@Mthvax.Miami.Edu (David Lesher) writes:

>3) One possible means to do this is by having articles checked by news,
>and those NOT intended for a site's distribution (ie you are in Iowa,
>and the article is marked "Chicago" would be PASSED by moving the
>article to the junk group. My feeble understanding of the RFC's is that
>junk handles VALID groups you only forward, but do not offer locally.

>I had NOT envisioned this as a means to remotely post to LOCAL groups,
>rather "locally" post to a NATIONAL group.

As far as the software is concerned, they're the same thing.  B news doesn't
even really distinguish top-level newsgroup hierarchy names (eg: "comp")
from geographic/organizational distributions, let alone local from 
national distributions.  H'm, is "eci." a heirarchy?  City?  Province?
State?  Canton?  Company?  Product?

The other difficulty is, without major rewriting of the semantics of the
sys files and so on, or lots of (usually out of date) "exception lists",
you're sort of condemning every site to pass everything.  Eg: everyone 
would have to (under-the-table) pass "ba." newsgroups because someone 
somewhere downstream might connect to "ba.".  And, if anybody accidentally
leaked "ba." out of it's normal area, bingo - new international distribution!

I don't think it's worth it, especially since there already *is* a
mechanism to do this - mail it to someone who already lives in that
region.  It happens reasonably often (several people have even been trusting
enough to ask *me* to do it for them ... silly fools ;-)
-- 
He's a consultant:             | Chris Lewis, Elegant Communications Inc.
Lend him your watch            | UUCP {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis
and he'll tell you the time.   | Moderator of the Ferret mailing list.
   Don Munroe, Cosmic Commander|