Xref: utzoo news.admin:7748 news.groups:14952 comp.os.vms:19892
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups,comp.os.vms
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: New newsgroup hierarchy
Message-ID: <1989Nov23.185950.3723@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1618.25614348@mccall.uucp> <1989Nov16.172110.21492@utzoo.uucp> <1989Nov20.005435.14063@wolves.uucp>
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 89 18:59:50 GMT

In article <1989Nov20.005435.14063@wolves.uucp> ggw@wolves.UUCP (Gregory G. Woodbury) writes:
>	Henry, please elaborate on your contention that there are
>"too many top-level names already"...

Have you seen an "all groups" sys-file line lately?  The days are long
past when it would fit in 80 columns.  And much of it is so stupidly
unnecessary.  There are *always* people who want group X and don't want
group Y, but those distinctions almost never seem to fall along the
lines of "give me comp but not vmsnet".  We really would lose very little
by integrating most of the non-mainstream top-level groups into the big
ones, perhaps with some sort of agreement about local management of the
namespace.  It would not increase the mainstream volume a lot -- most of
those groups are fairly quiet -- and it would give those groups much
wider distribution with much less hassle.

>To me it seems that the creation of
>a new top-level name is an ideal way to handle the potential traffic for
>lots of new sites that may come on the heels of this new set of software.

We didn't do it for MSDOS or the Amiga or any of the other operating
systems, and this somehow hasn't caused any major problems, even though
the groups concerned with those systems are among the busiest on Usenet.
Why on Earth should we do it for VMS?
-- 
That's not a joke, that's      |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
NASA.  -Nick Szabo             | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu