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Path: utzoo!linus!security!genrad!decvax!harpo!floyd!clyde!ihnp4!inuxc!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uiuccsb!essick
From: essick@uiuccsb.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.followup
Subject: Re: Request to submitters - (nf)
Message-ID: <3750@uiucdcs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 9-Nov-83 04:29:25 EST
Article-I.D.: uiucdcs.3750
Posted: Wed Nov  9 04:29:25 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 11-Nov-83 23:20:38 EST
Lines: 30

#R:hp-kirk:7200009:uiuccsb:3200019:000:1307
uiuccsb!essick    Nov  9 01:03:00 1983

I could have been less sarcastic in my previous response.

The way notesfiles sends things to news hasn't changed in the
last two years for the simple reason of backward compatibility.

To recap, the original problems which led to my putting the
notesfile header information into the body of the note were
(1) b-news didn't pass on unrecognized headers and (2) neither
version of news (a and b) liker unique identifiers longer than 
14 characters or in formats other than system.integer.

B-news has since been modified to pass unrecognized headers. The
unique identifier problem is (I gather) almost gone in 2.10.  Why
don't I convert?  Aside from such reasons as "I don't have time"
and "I see more important problems" the biggest is that of 
compatibility.  There are still sites running A-news, sites running
the old versions of B-news, and the sites running old versions of
notesfiles. This makes for a lot of conversion programs between
formats.

I've left things as they are because they seem to work. I could
probably come up with a way to do things that would make news-readers
happy, break all the notes-news gateways out there and avoid 
duplicates, and finally coerce (by way of dissatisfaction) the users
of the old notesfile versions to obtain new code.

-- Ray Essick, University of Illinois