Path: utzoo!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!coolidge From: coolidge@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: Just how useful is crossposting? Summary: Even easier failure... Message-ID: <1989Nov19.073043.22944@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu> Date: 19 Nov 89 07:30:43 GMT References: <47326@looking.on.ca> <1989Nov14.195710.11774@NCoast.ORG> <48887@looking.on.ca> <1989Nov17.231128.20369@rpi.edu> <1989Nov18.165018.11206@ddsw1.MCS.COM> Sender: news@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu Reply-To: coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu Organization: U of Illinois, CS Dept., Systems Research Group Lines: 45 karl@ddsw1.MCS.COM (Karl Denninger) writes: >In article <1989Nov17.231128.20369@rpi.edu> tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) writes: >>In <48887@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes: >>Brad> Please don't only include the parent article in the references >>Brad> line! If you must trim it down, then include at the very least >>Brad> the 'root' article and the parent. I think there was a move >>Brad> afoot to modify the RFC to say that. >> >>Why? Inheritance makes keeping any but the most recent reference >>around unnecessary. >Lose one followup in the chain and you may be >screwed<. Let's say you have >this set-up: >Item: <416@hosedsite> >Resp: <417@hosedsite> >Resp: <418@hosedsite> >Now you get <666@newsite>. It has as a references line: > References: <418@hosedsite> >All is well. We can find that. >Now assume you lost (or haven't yet gotten) <418@hosedsite>. How do you >figure out how the item in question is to be filed? Actually, it's fairly easy for this to happen if you consider a special case of the lost-article problem. First easy case: responses to cancelled articles. I've seen several of these in the past few months. Second easy case: restricted-distibution base articles with world-distribution follow-ups. I saw a _very_ interesting string a while back. The base article was locally distributed to someplace my then-server didn't get. The response was to world. The response to that response was local and we didn't get it, and the _next_ response was world again. Every other article, we got. Keep at least the original parent and the immediately previous note. This works much better in cases of limited backtracking ability and no worse in cases where all the information is present. It's not even hard to implement... --John -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. You may redistribute this article if and only if your recipients may as well. New NNTP connections always available! Send mail if you're interested.