Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncc!lyndon From: lyndon@ncc.Nexus.CA (Lyndon Nerenberg) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Binaries vs source, or UNIX vs PC's? Summary: What's the real issue? Message-ID: <10226@ncc.Nexus.CA> Date: 20 May 88 22:52:23 GMT References: <3116@charon.unm.edu> Reply-To: lyndon@ncc.nexus.ca (Lyndon Nerenberg) Organization: Nexus Computing Inc. Lines: 53 Although everyone is talking about sources vs binaries, I wonder if the real issue isn't escaping us? Nearly *all* the binary postings I have seen are for one of the many flavours of PC's. The UNIX sites seem to dislike moving binaries around, and the PC users have no use for source. To me, this boils down to a PC vs UNIX argument, not a source vs binaries one. When was the last time you saw a UNIX binary go by? Yes, there are a *few*. The ones I'm aware of are for the Sun. It has been proposed that a top level distribution be set up for binary postings. I agree with this in principle, however I can see some problems with it. It still leaves a lot of PC related traffic under the existing comp.sys.* namespace. The volume will grow considerably over the next few years, so eliminating only the binary groups is a short term solution at best. There is also a growing trend to post other than executable binary files in the current binaries groups - things like GIF files come to mind. I like collecting GIF files, however I end up looking in some unlikely places for them (comp.sys.binaries.just_about_everything, rec.trek, et al). Although they are binary files, they aren't "executables" which is what the binaries groups were originally set up to carry. I would hate to loose these postings simply because I had no use for PC executables. Alright, enough rambling :-) What to do? I think it's time the net considered the idea of splitting the group namespace in a way that separates UNIX groups from PC groups at a much higher level. Rick Adams has commented on how usenet started as a strictly UNIX related network, and others have indicated the growing resentment on the part of the "old guard" towards the growing amount of non-UNIX related traffic. Splitting the system dependent groups into unix.all and pc.all would make it much easier for sites to filter out material they are not interested in. [ NO comments on the proposed names - I'm simply trying to show a very generic example ] The generic groups (comp.mail, comp.lang, comp.text, etc.) would remain within the existing comp.all namespace. This namespace split would allow the existing backbone to drop the PC groups if they so desired. This is not to say they would do so. However, it is not fair to expect a backbone (or other) site to pay a significant amount of money moving groups that are of no use to them, or their neighbors. I'm sure that the PC sites don't want to spend money on groups they aren't interested in ei- ther. Such a split in the group namespace would make it easier for sites to get the groups they *do* want. -- {alberta,utzoo,uunet}!ncc!lyndon lyndon@Nexus.CA