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From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Re: Flame --> Orphaned Responses - (nf)
Message-ID: <387@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 29-Sep-83 14:16:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.387
Posted: Thu Sep 29 14:16:50 1983
Date-Received: Sun, 2-Oct-83 16:53:25 EDT
References: <2799@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Organization: Bell Labs, Columbus
Lines: 22

Rob and Ray may not have explained it crystally clear enough for everybody
on the net to understand, but there really is a good reason why notesfiles
says "Orphaned Response".  Not a great reason, but a reason why it's
nontrivial to fix.

The notesfile data structures are different from the news data structures.
In notesfiles, it doesn't just store the text (including headers) of the
article - it stores some binary goobies and the body of the article.
For a base note, the goobies include the subject.  For a response, they
include a reference to the base note, but not the subject itself.  After
all, the authors reasoned, you can get the subject by looking up the base note.
Why store it and transmit it around over and over?

Thus, when the base note has somehow gone away, the notes-to-news gateway
cannot find the title, and has to make one up.  So it makes up "Orphaned
Response".

I don't agree with this design decision, after all, having redundant
information around is useful.  But 20/20 hindsight is easy.  The net
was a much smaller place back when notesfiles was written.

	Mark