Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!steinmetz!welty
From: welty@steinmetz.ge.com (richard welty)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Wish List re: Crossposting
Message-ID: <10878@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 17 May 88 23:17:55 GMT
References: <439@bacchus.DEC.COM> <52859@sun.uucp> <9879@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <6075@sigi.Colorado.EDU> <1107@mcgill-vision.UUCP>
Reply-To: welty@steinmetz.UUCP (richard welty)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 32


In article <10837@steinmetz.ge.com> I wrote:
* Don't allow a user to post to a group unless the group is currently
* marked as subscribed to in the user's .newsrc file.

In article <1107@mcgill-vision.UUCP> mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse) writes:
>I don't *have* a .newsrc - I use my own newsreader, and it keeps its
>"messages read" information in an utterly incompatible format, so I
>used another name (.readrc) for it.  Does this mean I'm not allowed to
>crosspost?  If so, you can bet that'll be the second thing I'll fix
>when we get the new version.  (First thing will probably be AUTONEWNG.)

Well, I suggest that there are (at least) two issues here:

1) to what extent must news enhancements/innovations take into account
   local modifications to established structures?  Should developers of
   news software be limited in their actions because at certain sites
   local changes have been made that cannot be disturbed?

2) while I'm not at all familiar with news software internals, it seems
   to me to be basic software engineering practice to wire such things
   to compile time flags/constants/whatever so that they can be toggled,
   or even run time flags if that would be valuable.  I would regard a
   bolthole for knowledgable news readers to subvert this restriction
   a resonable thing to have anyway.

Of course, the above points apply equally to almost any other proposal
that might come up.
-- 
Richard Welty  518-387-6346  GE R&D, K1-5C39, Niskayuna, New York
   welty@ge-crd.ARPA  {uunet,philabs,rochester}!steinmetz!welty
    ``I'm not making any of this up you know'' -- Anna Russell