Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!shadooby!mailrus!cwjcc!hal!ncoast!allbery From: allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery) Newsgroups: news.groups Subject: Re: The Namespace: A Serious Delusion for the Net Message-ID: <1989Nov25.182609.19533@NCoast.ORG> Date: 25 Nov 89 18:26:09 GMT References: <5513@cps3xx.UUCP> Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery) Followup-To: news.groups Organization: North Coast Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, OH Lines: 70 In your article <5513@cps3xx.UUCP> ["The Namespace: A Serious Delusion for the Net"], you wrote: +--------------- | There seems to be a delusion on the part of some people | that the namespace structure -- the system of newsgroup | naming conventions -- is to help readers find articles | they want to read. This reason is often given in argu- | ments about what name a newsgroup should have, especially | what hierarchy it should be in. | | This delusion is almost the opposite of the truth. The | function of the namespace is to help sysadmins filter out | articles they don't want on their systems. That is why | sci groups are better distributed than, say, soc groups. +--------------- You further go on to state that those who oppose "misplaced" newsgroups are authoritarian anti-democratic etc., etc., etc. I voted against sci.aquaria. I explained my reasoning to Richard Sexton, who had stated that he wanted *.aquaria to have good distribution, which meant placing it in sci.all. I replied that this was mis-use of the top-level hierarchies, which were intended to classify newsgroups by type and subject; his response to this was that the top-level hierarchies are nonetheless used for administrative control and that he intended to get the best of it. (My further response was that two wrongs don't make a right, which is tangentially related to the current subject.) In any case, the argument in question is the opposite of that which you put forward; paradoxically, Richard Sexton's preference of sci.aquaria legitimizes the very "authoritarian" use of top-level hierarchies that you dislike, and my counter-argument against sci.aquaria was based on a denial of that use. The basic problem is that, as of the same news software revision which made multiple hierarchies possible, independent news distributions were also made possible -- but they are rarely used and distinctly unstable. (See the discussion of "leaky" newsgroups in the "inet" distribution.) C news repairs this by explicitly separating distribution from hierarchy, but the damage is already done. In a perfect world, the sci *distribution* would have nothing to do with the sci.all *hierarchy*. Unfortunately, B news (with the possible exception of B 3.0 aka TMNN) does not make this distinction clear, suffering from much the same problem as do humans trying to distinguish the two uses of "sci" described by the first statement in this paragraph. The simple cure, usable in both B and C news, is to use distinctive distri- bution names which differ from the hierarchy names. It is quite reasonable to consider an article whose header contains, say, Newsgroups: sci.aquaria Distribution: dist-rec where the "dist-" prefix denotes a distribution, as opposed to a hierarchy. Even the slightly confused distribution semantics of B news can deal with this distinction. Will it happen? I doubt it; rational responses don't appear to be character- istic of the Usenet as it currently exists. But it is relatively easy to implement and will not break existing software (except for pre-B 2.10.2 news, which was pretty well broken by the Great Newsgroup Renaming anyway), and will help to resolve the problem caused by one servant (hierarchy) serving two masters (classification and distribution). ++Brandon -- Brandon S. Allbery allbery@NCoast.ORG, BALLBERY (MCI Mail), ALLBERY (Delphi) uunet!hal.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery ncoast!allbery@hal.cwru.edu bsa@telotech.uucp *(comp.sources.misc mail to comp-sources-misc[-request]@backbone.site, please)* *Third party vote-collection service: send mail to allbery@uunet.uu.net (ONLY)* expnet.all: Experiments in *net management and organization. Mail me for info.