Path: utzoo!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tektronix!sequent!ccssrv!perry
From: perry@ccssrv.UUCP (Perry Hutchison)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Just how useful is crossposting?
Message-ID: <854@ccssrv.UUCP>
Date: 22 Nov 89 03:52:19 GMT
References: <47326@looking.on.ca> <838@ccssrv.UUCP> <1989Nov17.173753.9790@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: perry@ccssrv.UUCP (Perry Hutchison)
Organization: Control-C Software, Inc., Beaverton, OR
Lines: 36

In article <1989Nov17.173753.9790@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu> coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu
writes:
+ perry@ccssrv.UUCP (Perry Hutchison) writes:
  < part of quotation deleted >
+ >New (or revised)
+ >posting programs would prompt for the followup group, if not specified.
+ >To maximize compliance in the presence of older posting programs, the
+ >originating transport program (e.g.  inews) could check for cross-postings
+ >without a Followup-To: and insert one, specifying the first-listed newsgroup.
+ 
+ ACK! Not only do we have a bogus requirement that only one group
+ contain followups, but we get to engage in gratuitous header
+ rewriting to enforce it.

Who said anything about REwriting headers?  I specified the _originating_
transport, i.e. the first one to see the article, i.e. the one on the
poster's system; and only the _addition_ of a Followup-To: if it were
missing from a cross-posted article.  This is a recognition of the fact
that a site admin updates one transport, but perhaps N readers/posters, so
one must expect the readers/posters to sometimes lag behind.

+ Crosspostings are a feature, not a bug. They decrease the amount of
+ time readers have to spend chasing all over the namespace trying to
+ find the articles they're interested in. I ask again: what problem
+ exactly are you (those trying to modify crossposting) trying to
+ solve?

One recent example occurred in comp.os.minix.  A question regarding minix
on an IBM PC was crossposted to comp.os.minix and comp.sys.ibm.pc.  I don't
remember the topic, but I think the original crossposting was appropriate.
The problem was that the followup thread ended up having nothing at all to
do with minix, but it was still there because the followup authors weren't
editing the Newsgroups.

Maybe there is a better way to solve problems like that, but the current
situation is certainly not without its difficulties.