Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!crdgw1!uunet!wang!fitz From: fitz@wang.com (Tom Fitzgerald) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: sys file entries for CNEWS Message-ID: Date: 29 Mar 91 00:53:26 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> Organization: Wang Labs, Lowell MA, USA Lines: 46 brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes: > 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. What's the point of making the distributions and hierarchies have different names, if you're still going to have regional hierarchies? At least C-news separated the group list from the distribution list, so it's much easier to get things in the "ne" distribution without getting ne.* newsgroups. Since that's possible, I really don't see what you can do by renaming one of them that you can't already do. > Newsclip uses a file called distlist which does this roughly. It assigns > a numeric value to each distribution that is an approximation of the > number of people who read it, thus ordering them to some degree. In > retrospect, this is not perfect, because it doesn't tell us how to > combine conflicting hierarchies that a site exists within. UUNET would > be a royal mess since it lives in every distribution it can get its > hands on. I think there are more sites that take overlapping distributions than there are sites that live in a pure hierarchy. We get "dc.*" and "sco.*" here, and used to get more of the left-coast groups. A guy in Michigan recently posted something to ne.jobs. There's really nothing wrong with this. Any proposed change that requires kludging non-hierarchical distributions is seriously flawed. It might be real good to enforce a little more discipline on posting, for sure. Nn by default uses a Distribution: from the top-level hierarchy of the group being posted to, and that's a plain mistake. Inews could certainly complain about bogus distributions, at least malformed ones. But personally, I'm going to keep "all,!whatever" in the sys file for the sites I feed. It's just too convenient. Right now, of all the news on this system, 32% of the articles with Distribution: headers are incorrect. They're malformed, or the name of a news hierarchy or plain newsgroup, or something like that. I don't want to block a third of the news from passing through here, just to enforce my opinion of an ideal world. When enough posting agents get changed to bring the percent of bad distributions down to 1% or 2% then it might be worth changing the relaying code too, but I wouldn't be in any hurry. --- Tom Fitzgerald Wang Labs fitz@wang.com 1-508-967-5278 Lowell MA, USA ...!uunet!wang!fitz