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From: gds@mit-eddie.UUCP (Greg Skinner)
Newsgroups: net.news.group,net.news
Subject: Re: why people don't upgrade to the newest and bluest B news
Message-ID: <469@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 16-Nov-85 18:18:57 EST
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.469
Posted: Sat Nov 16 18:18:57 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 18-Nov-85 07:30:32 EST
References: <202@bambi.UUCP> <677@decuac.UUCP> <955@utcs.uucp>
Organization: MIT Lusers and Hosers Inc., Cambridge, Ma.
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I am glad to see someone supporting the arguments against upgrading to
the latest and greatest versions of B news.  Some people like Fred
Avolio and Erik Fair don't seem to understand that different computing
facilities have different needs, and as such the versions of news they
run will be different according to their needs.

If you are only responsible for one or two machines, it is simple enough
to coordinate the establishment of resources for upgrades to news.  But
when it becomes upwards of 20 machines, you begin to have problems,
especially when these machines are of different cpu type, OS type, disk
technology (implying online disk storage) and play different roles.

At my previous job, we had a policy that a new piece of software could
not be installed on any of our machines unless it was installed on ALL
of our machines, and was made compatible with all the other machines.
All the quirks needed to be ironed out, so that if a user switched
machines (not uncommon in a rapidly changing environment), it would
appear to the user that he was using the same version of news.  This
becomes especially difficult when most of these users are novices, and
need to be protected from quirks which experienced users know how to get
around.

I wanted to install a version of 2.10.2 made compatible for Sys V, but
was constrained by not having enough space on all the machines to
install it.  I could not simply blow away other things on disk, because
the people on the machines needed them.  This version of news was
specifically designed to provide me with automatic updates of the
executable, so it had to reside in specific directories.  However,
because there wasn't enough space on all the machines, none of them could
be upgraded to 2.10.2.

In addition, we used to run the expire in 2.10, but found that it wasn't
getting rid of enough articles.  We resorted to the "brute force" method
of expiring news, find /usr/spool/news -type f -mtime +7 -exec rm {}.
Crude, bit it did the job the provided source didn't do.

You see folks, certain sites have darn good reasons for running the versions
of news they do.  As long as they are not polluting the net with incorrect-
ly formatted articles, or dropping news accidentally, they have every right to
run the version of news they want to.  I agree that versions of notes that 
generate "Orphaned Response" and don't do aliasing correctly should be fixed,
but any version of B news that does not muck up the headers or interfere
with transmission of articles has as micuh right being there as the latest
versions.

If you don't agree with me, then maybe you'd like to answer to my former
users, whenever they find a bug in 2.10.3beta, with a timely bug fix?
-- 
It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from goin' under.

Greg Skinner (gregbo)
{decvax!genrad, allegra, ihnp4}!mit-eddie!gds
gds@mit-eddie.mit.edu