Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!mcnc!uvaarpa!haven!mimsy!nocusuhs!nmrdc1!minixug!arrakis!bert From: bert@arrakis.nl.mugnet.org (Bert Laverman) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: comp.os.minix splitup Message-ID: <9103223418@arrakis.nl.mugnet.org> Date: 22 Mar 91 13:33:59 GMT Organization: Alphasoft Nederland Lines: 69 Kenneth J. Hendrickson wrote: > Peter da Silva wrote: >>If Andy won't post to a moderated group, that pretty much shoots that >>whole idea down. :-< > > How about a moderated group for official new releases of Minix? > And officially approved bug fixes? Yikes! Why would you want that??? Official releases are recognized by their senders, and the Subject line giving a new Minix version number. Besides, official releases don't occur that often. Beta-prereleases however.... ;-) >>Now that you've brought the idea up, how do people feel about a ".sources" >>and a ".patches" group, both? > > I would like to see a group .patches, for officially sanctioned upgrades > and bug fixes. This group should be moderated. If not moderated, great > pressure must be put on all of us not to post until we get approval from > official sources (the testing group?) to do so. Again, here you're creating a group with very sparse traffic. What's the use of moderating a group that should only be used by the original writers of programs? Again the real "officially sancioned" upgrades are easily recognized by subject line and sender. > The .sources group would be for anything. This includes non-approved > bug fixes, and whole programs (like sc, c68, c386, etc.), and everything > in between. Hey, you want official patches in an moderated group, but the programs those patches are for in an unmoderated group???? > I think it would be good to have a moderated group for officially > sanctioned stuff, and it is obviously necessary to have a non-moderated > group for the masses to dump into. For me, it is sometimes hard to > determine just what is officially approved, and what isn't. EVERYTHING THAT'S OFFICIALLY SANCIONED, IS THEREFORE ALREADY MODERATED! Simple: Official patches are announced as "Patchlevel #" or "Patch nr. #", and always by the original poster of the program, or else by someone who mentions in the posting that he doing so _for_ the original poster. I suppose we can trust each other not to pretend, eh? And when in doubt, find the sender of the original posting, and _ask_him/her_! As for my own opinion, I don't think a splitup is absolutely necessary... yet. It _would_ make it easyer, however, to separate "save-worthy" postings from "read-only" postings. It's sometimes a bit annoying to have to pick up the pieces of a source posting from between discussions on the differences between 386sx and 386dx processors, or even about "where to get the best buy on minix"! (That was a really dumb one if you ask me. Just post one message breathing the words "public domain" and "minix" in the same paragraph, and you'll get gobs of replies ranging from "no it isn't" to "hey, is it pd? where?") So, count this one as in favor of an _unmoderated_ group with both code, and patches. I suppose man pages would be ok also, but what about "Ten easy steps to xxxx happyness"? ;-) Greetings, Bert ===================================================================== Bert Laverman email: bert@arrakis.nl.mugnet.org Molukkenstraat 148 work: laverman@cs.rug.nl 9715 NZ Groningen The Netherlands tel.: +31 50 - 733587 From "How to catch a lion in the desert": The Dirac method: We assert that wild lions can ipso facto not be observed in the Sahara desert. Therefore, _if_ there are any lions at all in the desert, they are tame. We leave catching a tame lion as an exercise to the reader. =====================================================================