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From: pst@ack.Stanford.EDU (Paul Traina)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: C news and bogus distributions (e.g. Dist: comp)
Message-ID: <pst.655622474@ack.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 11 Oct 90 05:21:14 GMT
Sender: news@morrow.stanford.edu (UNIX News Service)
Organization: Data Center, Stanford University, California, USA
Lines: 57

[Henry/Geoff: I tried to send mail to you about this first, but must have
 had the wrong address for comments, so I decided to open up to the world.]

Some programs, like Pnews in rn insist on generating articles with bogus
distribution lines.  Since C news does the right thing by separating out
distributions from newsgroups in the sys file,  I've seen a slight problem.

My sys entry might look like:

kink.com:alt.sex.bondage/ca,usa,na,world:l:

Now the problem is that if an article comes in with:

Newsgroups: alt.sex.bondage
Distribution: alt

C news won't send the message along.

For a while, I was doing negative distribtions along the lines of:

kink.com:alt.sex.bondage/all,!local,!csd,!sdc,!su,!ba:l:

But this is bogus (and if you think about it, really the wrong way to do
it).

I was going to patch oktransmit() in relaynews so that if the distribution
was singular (ba as opposed to ba,ca) and was the same as the top level
of the newsgroup heirarchy,  it would consider the distribution to be
DEFDIST (in this case world).


However,  I find this to be an ugly solution because I was considering creating
two distributions for our university groups:

So we end up with a newsgroup:

	su.sex

and a distribution levels: su and su-export.  Only messages with distribution
su.export get sent off campus.  However, now "su" gets mapped to world, and
distribution "su" messages get sent off campus.

However, we've got two cases -- one where there are legitimate distributions
with similar names (e.g. ba, ca, su) and then "national" groups with fake
distribtutions (such as comp, fj, bit)...  I could read in a distribution
file when relaynews starts and map all invalid distributions to world...
	sigh.

Mapping to "world" seems to do the right thing in 99% of the cases,
but I find it a losing situation.  Has anyone else thought about this?

(p.s. Would people consider it anti-social if we started re-writing headers
      so the message actually gets a legitimate distribution?)
--
At AIR,  if we can't fix something, it isn't broken.
			(ruthlessly stolen from a lab manager at HP via
			 rec.humor.funny)