Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!apple!mauxci!eci386!woods From: woods@eci386.uucp (Greg A. Woods) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: sys file entries for CNEWS Message-ID: <1991Mar27.180910.584@eci386.uucp> Date: 27 Mar 91 18:09:10 GMT References: <1991Mar18.170511.6535@st_nik!swindon.ingr.com> <1991Mar19.224950.4653@zoo.toronto.edu> <449@skyking.UUCP> <1991Mar23.193554.25944@looking.on.ca> <1991Mar23.220933.27563@looking.on.ca> Reply-To: woods@eci386.UUCP (Greg A. Woods) Organization: Elegant Communications Inc. Lines: 51 In article <1991Mar23.220933.27563@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes: > As far as I am concerned I see no reason at all to propagate the > articles that say, "Distribution: everyone" or some other such mistake. > Perhaps the local inews program should check for this and warn the user, > but to have any typo or mistake go to the entire world is not the way > to do it in my opinion. Agreed. The primary problem with Distribution: is a lot of broken news posting programmes. > But we went half-way, because we still have these hierarcies that > match distributions. There is a "ba" (bay area) hierararchy, as in > ba.this, and a "ba" distribution. Yeah, so what's wrong with that? > a) Completely disassociate distributions and hierarchies. Rename one or > the other -- probably easiest to rename the distributions. Why? Why can't the name-space be disassociated, thus allowing distributions of 'can' and hierarchies of 'can.all'? Distributions should be geographical or organisational, and heierarchies should be content related. > c) Define a standard file like the active file that contains the > distributions and information about them, to be used by posting programs > and others. This file should list distributions in a hierarchical fashion. Some parts of current news systems have such a definition. In rn's Pnews this seems to live entirely in the script, though there is internal mention to a /usr/lib/news(/rn)/distributions file, which I have occasionally seen used. If I remember, it looked just like a newsgroups file with 2 fields -- namedescription. I would like to see not a "standard file", but rather a standard set of distributions which could be locally supplemented in ways similar to newsgroups, with perhaps a checkdistrib message to update and verify one's distributions descriptions. Then, we need a change to the RFC to make Distribution: a required header, and new versions of news posting programmes that validate this header from the standard (plus local) definitions, perhaps providing a nifty menu interface for helping the user choose an allowable selection (which would also be used for newsgroups selection!). I remain unconvinced that we really need heirarchical distributions. -- Greg A. Woods woods@{eci386,gate,robohack,ontmoh,tmsoft}.UUCP ECI and UniForum Canada +1-416-443-1734 [h] +1-416-595-5425 [w] VE3TCP Toronto, Ontario CANADA Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible-ORWELL