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From: lmb@vicom.com (Larry Blair)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Apology for repostings in alt - 2 C News bugs
Message-ID: <1990Sep25.210842.9@vicom.com>
Date: 25 Sep 90 21:08:42 GMT
References: <1990Sep24.220833.230@vicom.com> <1990Sep25.153457.2612@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: Vicom Systems Inc., Fremont, CA
Lines: 42

In article <1990Sep25.153457.2612@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
=In article <1990Sep24.220833.230@vicom.com> lmb@vicom.com (Larry Blair) writes:
=>... by removing the Message-ID and using `inews -d local'.
=>Unfortunately, our version of C News (PL 18, if you were counting) only
=>inserts `Distribution: local' if there is no Distribution header already
=>present...
=
=I don't think it has ever been clear what the semantics are supposed to be
=if the same header crops up in both inews options and the article itself.
=(Actually, we think most of the inews options are silly ideas, since it's
=no harder to just plug the header into the article.)

I was so sure of your response, Henry, that I composed the following paragraph
yesterday:

The decision about what to do when a directive appears as both a command line
option and in the file being acted upon is not ambiguous.  Unix, as defined
by its many utilities, has a clear direction: command line options take
precedence.  Programming difficulty or execution speed should not be an
issue here.

As to whether one should use the command line option or not: you can't be
serious about your argument.  Do you really think that it would have been
just as easy to have modified the 400 articles that were being locally
reposted as it was to stick `-d local' on the command line?

You have made it clear innumerable times that you feel that inews and other
2.11 programs are silly.  Why, then, did you implement look-alikes?  I
suspect it was to make life easier on people making the transition.
Unfortunately, users are bound to assume that they operate the same as their
2.11 namesakes, particularly if the documentation doesn't point out any
differences.  By regarding inews as silly and only making a half hearted
attempt to implement it properly, you have unwittingly released hundreds of
bogus newgroups to the net and now hundreds of dups.

There is nothing wrong with having made mistakes in the original
implementation.  That is to be expected with a system this size.  What is
needed is to acknowledge the problems and try to correct them.

If you think that inews is silly, yank it.
-- 
Larry Blair   ames!vsi1!lmb   lmb@vicom.com