Newsgroups: news.software.b Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!math.lsa.umich.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!rpi.edu!tale From: tale@turing.cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) Subject: Re: parallel sys file entries in C News Message-ID: Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Computer Science, Troy NY References: <1990Aug28.123323.2598@robobar.co.uk> <1990Aug28.172106.20512@zoo.toronto.edu> Date: 29 Aug 90 05:51:03 GMT Lines: 55 In <1990Aug28.172106.20512@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer): On an unrelated topic, something we should perhaps address in documentation is that there seems to be a popular myth that "!local" in the distribution subfield has some kind of magic effect. It doesn't. Unless your local articles actually contain "Distribution: local" lines, "!local" is quite meaningless. One thing about this "popular myth" is that it is very useful, Henry, and I wish you wouldn't attempt to _discourage_ it. If you instruct your users that there is such a thing as a Distribution: local, even indirectly as the answer for the most restrictive distribution question in rn's Configure, than of course when the articles do contain it they should be restricted. I personally have /all,!local,!rpi in most of my sys entries and I don't consider it to be some sort of "magic effect". I use local distribution for checkgroups messages (son of a gun! isn't that what spaf puts in the sample checkgroups messages?) and burst digests; I could use an organisation prefix but since other people use my script to burst digests too I made it a nice generic local. Also, some other sites get rpi.* and I really don't want to be inflicting my own personal checkgroups on them. (Simple fix for that too, I know. Just start doing checkgroups without posting them; feed it to ctl/checkgroups directly.) Do you know what the intended distribution of alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork was? C'mon, one guess. Somehow this person got a notion that Distribution: local meant something, and it isn't that terrible to have a nice generic notion like that which can be carried from site to site by users. I am under the impression that perhaps this person got the notion from when they ran B News and local was special cased (does B News do that in the code?). Another thing that lends itself to this impression is that when I _wasn't_ blocking local I would get complaints from B News sites I fed which were getting "bogus local distribution rejected!" messages filling their logs as their nntpd kept spewing back rejected-try-again codes and my site kept trying to offer the articles. I think this only happened with control articles that came through. I also don't know whether this was because !local was in his ME: line, but I think it does have it there -- whether it did at the time, I don't know. It's sort of a mystery to me what those problems were since I didn't poke through the B News sources and his sys file. The nice "magic effect" I get by putting !local in my sys entries is certainly worth having it there. !local is not at all meaningless at my site, even when my own local articles (which often contain "Distribution: rpi" which does in fact get a wider distribution than local) do not contain it because it means I am not forwarding articles that I received which someone else really seemingly intended to not go anywhere. -- (setq mail '("tale@cs.rpi.edu" "tale@ai.mit.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet")) The most remarkable thing about looking at a picture of myself was the sudden realisation that my hair is in fact parted on the left and not the right.