Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ulysses!allegra!princeton!caip!think!nike!sri-spam!gds
From: gds@sri-spam.ARPA (The lost Bostonian)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Yet another view on the death of the "soapbox groups"
Message-ID: <5946@sri-spam.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 20-Jun-86 09:32:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-spam.5946
Posted: Fri Jun 20 09:32:34 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 21-Jun-86 13:19:10 EDT
References: <1760@hound.UUCP> <20682@styx.UUCP> <6910@ki4pv.UUCP> <3911@gatech.CSNET>
Organization: East Coast Refugees, Inc.
Lines: 24
Summary: this is an old argument

In article <3911@gatech.CSNET>, spaf@gatech.CSNET (Gene Spafford) writes:
> "Ancient" is sites STILL running 2.10, 2.10.1, and even 2.9 and A-news.
> 2.10.2 has been out for about 2 years.  What is the excuse of sites
> that haven't upgraded?

Not every site is at liberty to change their software when a new release
is out.  There can be factors involved to prevent this.  For example,
where I used to work, we had to keep the same software on all the
machines we administrated for ease of administration.  That meant that
all the software had to work on all the machines before it could be
installed.  Also there was the issue of support -- because we wanted to
get out of the business of supporting news, we were trying to run the
exptools version of news (if you don't understand this, this is a
version of news that lots of sites in AT&T run).  Well, we made it as
far as 22 out of 25 machines that we could successfully install it on,
but the remaining three did not have enough disk space, and the machine
owners refused to reconfigure their disks.  So, no exptools (it was
2.10.2 back then, current at the time we tried to switch over).

I'm sure others have stories to tell about how they could not install
the new news for administrative reasons.  Before you start to insult us
consider our special situations.

--gregbo