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From: dave@onfcanim.UUCP (Dave Martindale)
Newsgroups: net.news.notes
Subject: Re: > 14-char newsgroup names
Message-ID: <14893@onfcanim.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 4-Jul-86 12:02:30 EDT
Article-I.D.: onfcanim.14893
Posted: Fri Jul  4 12:02:30 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Jul-86 06:46:39 EDT
References: <3700001@occrsh.UUCP>
Reply-To: dave@onfcanim.UUCP (Dave Martindale)
Organization: National Film Board / Office national du film, Montreal
Lines: 16

Forgive me if this is a stupid question (I've never seen a copy of notes),
but:

Very early versions of the "news" system (perhaps A news, or maybe very
early "B" news, had the same 14-character limit on article names, because
each newsgroup got a directory.  This was recognized as a serious problem,
and fixed by the simple method of changing periods to slashes when
building a file name from a newsgroup name.

Now, why couldn't such a simple fix be made to notesfiles as well?
Most of the software could continue to deal with newsgroup names containing
periods, and only when a file or directory was actually accessed would
it be necessary to do the transliteration.

If this isn't possible, why not?  And if it is possible, why not just
make the change?