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From: jimb@silvlis.com (Jim Budler)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: parallel sys file entries in C News
Message-ID: <1990Aug30.065506.20290@silvlis.com>
Date: 30 Aug 90 06:55:06 GMT
References: <1990Aug28.123323.2598@robobar.co.uk> <1990Aug28.172106.20512@zoo.toronto.edu> <YM=%=1_@rpi.edu> <1990Aug29.184257.25@zoo.toronto.edu>
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Reply-To: jimb@silvlis.com (Jim Budler)
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In article <1990Aug29.184257.25@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <YM=%=1_@rpi.edu> tale@turing.cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) writes:
>>One thing about this "popular myth" is that it is very useful, Henry,
>>and I wish you wouldn't attempt to _discourage_ it...
>
>The idea of a "local" distribution has merit.  The belief that it will
>automatically do the right thing, everywhere, without attention, on the
>other hand, is badly misguided.  As witness:
>
The problem boils down to an undocumented "B-news" "feature" that
Distribution: local *was* magic. So was world. I welcome and like the
seperation of newsgroups and distribution that Cnews started.

I think your (Henry's) message at the start of this thread was too easily
(mis)interpreted as discouraging the use of /all,!local in Cnews sys files,
instead of promoting the information that the Distribution: local has no
defined meaning in Cnews.

I had a slight mail interchange with Geoff on this problem some time
ago which I didn't pursue, since I had a workaround. I was jim@eda.com
at the time if Geoff wants to check. I feel that the problem is
completely documentation, and not a problem requiring any code changes.

The *undocumented* behaviour of B-news was that Distribution: local was
special. But after several years of use this was *expected* behaviour
by many admins. I believe the Cnews documentation should mention
this difference in the same place it documents the "/" which seperates
newsgroups from distribution. A paragraph similar to this would
suffice:

	"Bnews appears to treat "world" and "local" as special cases
	when matching sys file entries to Distribution headers.
	Cnews, on the other hand has only one special case distribution,
	all.

	The closest approximation of a typical Bnews sys file entry:

		neighbor:world,comp,sys,news::

	is probably:

		neighbor:comp,sci,news::

	or

		neighbor:comp,sci,news/all,!local::"

Now I may have this a little wrong, but my paragraph does demonstrate
the fact that the Cnews distribution "all" is not the same as the
Bnews distribution "world".

But hey, the problem here is only minor. When Bnews introduced "world"
news stopped flowing along the expected paths. When Cnews introduced "all"
the news started flowing along unexpected paths.

Which is worse?

jim

--
Jim Budler          jimb@silvlis.com       +1.408.991.6061
Silvar-Lisco, Inc. 703 E. Evelyn Ave. Sunnyvale, Ca. 94086