Path: utzoo!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!usc!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!night From: night@pawl.rpi.edu (Trip Martin) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: Just how useful is crossposting? Message-ID: <1989Nov18.043506.25971@rpi.edu> Date: 18 Nov 89 04:35:06 GMT References: <47326@looking.on.ca> <1989Nov14.195710.11774@NCoast.ORG> <48887@looking.on.ca> <1989Nov17.231128.20369@rpi.edu> Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY Lines: 24 In <1989Nov17.231128.20369@rpi.edu> tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) writes: >Why? Inheritance makes keeping any but the most recent reference >around unnecessary. I am looking at article <3@foo.bar> and see one >person quoted, the one who wrote <2@foo.bar>. <2@foo.bar> referenced ><0@foo.bar> but no reference was made to it except through some >indirection. When I back trace through the articles referenced by the >Message-IDs I find the parent of the thread was . >Keeping redundant data sets around is not necessary to accomplish that. This breaks if you're missing an article in the chain. I don't know how much of a problem this would be in practice, though. A suspect uucp sites would have a much greater problem with this than internet sites. It's pretty much a tradeoff. You could greatly reduce the chance of a broken thread by keeping around the parent and grandparent message-ids. That way, both parent and grand- parent articles would have to be lost before a thread is broken. I think this would be highly unlikely. It doesn't increase the references line by much either. -- Trip Martin KA2LIV Trip_Martin@mts.rpi.edu night@pawl.rpi.edu night@uruguay.acm.rpi.edu ** Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics: Things get worse under pressure **