Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!ucsd!swrinde!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!coolidge
From: coolidge@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Methods for updating a feeds sys file
Message-ID: <1989Nov14.182608.1910@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 14 Nov 89 18:26:08 GMT
References: <1989Nov13.145624.15454@monymsys.uucp>
Sender: news@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu
Reply-To: coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu
Organization: U of Illinois, CS Dept., Systems Research Group
Lines: 33

david@monymsys.uucp (David Kozinn) writes:
>So much for the intro, now to the meat: It would seem that I'm not the only
>person in the world who has ever had to do this, and for feeds that don't have
>an administrator as patient as mine (thanks Pete!) it would seem to make sense
>to figure out some automated way to do this. I've read the manuals, looked at
>RFC 1036 to see if there is a control message, and asked a few folks, and from
>what I've been able to determine, there doesn't seem to be an automated way to
>tell your upstream feed that you'd like to have the list of groups modified 
>that are sent to you. 

TMNN news has a feature that does this, I think. If it proves to be
useful (and it seems to me that it would) then I would tend to guess
that people will retrofit it into the other major news packages.

For now, most people just have to suffer with sending mail to their
feeds asking for subscription lists to be changed. We have just about
the opposite problem: we take all newsgroups that people will send us,
and whenever someone adds a new distribution we need it added to our
sys entry. Furthermore, we add a new distribution every few weeks, and
there's no good protocol for informing our connections that we now have
more to offer. I'm considering doing a census of my connections every
couple months informing them of what we currently carry and what their
current sys line is and checking to see if they want any of the other
distributions.

--John

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John L. Coolidge     Internet:coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP:uiucdcs!coolidge
Of course I don't speak for the U of I (or anyone else except myself)
Copyright 1989 John L. Coolidge. Copying allowed if (and only if) attributed.
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