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From: reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid)
Newsgroups: net.cooks
Subject: Re: Mod.recipes stuff
Message-ID: <1909@glacier.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 3-Dec-85 00:23:05 EST
Article-I.D.: glacier.1909
Posted: Tue Dec  3 00:23:05 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Dec-85 05:19:10 EST
References: <211@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Reply-To: reid@glacier.UUCP (Brian Reid)
Distribution: net
Organization: Stanford University, Computer Systems Lab
Lines: 48


I am the current moderator of mod.recipes.  It is not a monarchy,
and I do not claim to be its dictator--I am merely its creator, like the
good Dr. Frankenstein was the creator of his monster.

I am also the USENET site administrator of a backbone site; I am involved
in various schemes to reduce traffic on the network.

I am of two minds about posting cleartext to net.recipes. It will double
the network traffic of the larger postings, and significantly increase the
number of "double messages" seen by some people. On the other hand,
cleartext is easier to read.

There have been 6 or 7 recipes posted to mod.recipes so far. About 4 of them
came from the past year of net.cooks--things that caught my eye or that I
tried and liked. 

Mod.recipes is more than just a collection of recipes. It is a database
system, including extraction programs, indexing programs, and various shell
scripts to run the recipes through the roff of your choice. This way each
reader of mod.recipes can produce a customized cookbook, complete with table
of contents and index, that works very much the same way the Unix man pages
and the unix programmer's manual work. Also I check every recipe pretty
carefully, correct spelling errors, add keywords, and in general perform
editorial functions. Whether or not you like the way I do it, I claim that
editorial consistency in something like a cookbook is valuable.

I would like to suggest two alternatives before I go posting cleartext to
net.cooks:
 (1) I will be happy to set up a mailing list, for ARPANET/CSNET, of people
who prefer to receive their mod.recipes by mail than by netnews. I would
even be happy to set up a second mailing list for people who would like to
reeive cleartext copies of them by ARPANET/CSNET mail.

 (2) You should try reading the sources as they stand, in a very stylized
TRoff. They are remarkably easy to read, given that they are the input to a
formatter. They aren't the sort of thing that you would want to go putting
in a notebook, but I think that they are quite readable if what you're
trying to do is decide whether or not you want to keep it.

Now, pray tell: can you explain how it is that some site can consider net.*
groups as worth letting people see, but not mod.* groups?

Brian Reid
Stanford
-- 
	Brian Reid	decwrl!glacier!reid
	Stanford	reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA