Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!pyramid!csg From: csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: New newsgroup hierarchy Message-ID: <91714@pyramid.pyramid.com> Date: 19 Nov 89 18:15:15 GMT References: <1618.25614348@mccall.uucp> <1989Nov16.172110.21492@utzoo.uucp> <91457@pyramid.pyramid.com> <1640@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> Reply-To: csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) Organization: Pyramid Technology Corp., Mountain View, CA Lines: 30 >|No! This is a different distribution -- therefore it definitely should have >|its own top-level name. The whole inet thing -- running a completely separate >|distribution within the traditional namespace -- has adaquately demonstrated >|that this is the wrong way to go. > >.... but usenet has a separate field for distribution, separate from >the name of the group. Which works poorly, at best. The default distribution is "world." Making the users remember to put in the correct distribution manually just doesn't work. Blaming it on "inadaquate software" is an inadaquate solution until someone steps forward to write the software. Again, witness the inet distribution, which is constantly leaking out into the mainstream Usenet, and constantly drawing questions from confused users and admins about what all those other groups are. >If UNIX (run by most of the sites on the net) and MS-DOS (important either >personally or financially at most sites on the net) don't get their own >distribution, why should vms? .... There are lots of distributions now, such >as alt, which are organizational rather than geographic. We have one for PCs running UNIX; it's called unix-pc. You want one for UNIX or MS/DOS, go right ahead and create it! No one is stopping you. Just like we have biz, gnu, clari, bionet, and dozens of other private hierarchies, some geographical (like ca and eunet), others logical (like alt and pubnet). Are you seriously suggesting that all of these private distributions should have their newsgroup names within the same hierarchy as the mainstream Usenet? The only precedent we have for this is inet, and it does *not* work.