gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (10/21/86)
Net.sources used to have the same problems as net.micro.atari16 with
regards to large postings producing hundreds of requests for retransmission.
One person (I think it was Bill Mitchell of U. of Arizona) said he'd
never again post any big thing to the net because it was weeks of hassle
straightening it all out. Then he released a revised version and had to
face it all again...so he send it to mod.sources
The mod.sources moderators keep careful watch on their news links, and
have arranged for each posting to appear simultaneously on many
machines around the net. This significantly reduces the chances of
your getting a truncated copy, or no copy at all, since the message
will have to go through less hops to get to you, and if one site drops
it, another will carry it to you. Also, just having the moderator
check the message to see if it will download, reduces the trash by a
large factor.
This takes work, however, and requires a site with good news links (or
that is willing to make a set of good cross country links for shipping
the newsgroup out to the world). Reliable mail is also essential,
since all the postings will come in to the moderator by mail. I suggest
that the Atari community find a person at such a site to handle
distribution of large Atari sources or binaries. Ideally this person
is already a PD software packrat, so they know what they are getting
into. The moderator should also have good bit of disk space [on their
Unix machine] for archives of what's been posted.
I don't think there would be much complaining from the netghods about
creating mod.atari16.sources and binaries groups, given a willing
moderator.
As for IBM machines not knowing what their character set is and messing
up postings, I suggest that the BITNET sites involved submit an APAR to
IBM complaining that their operating system should support ASCII as an
alternative to EBCDIC, and see what they say. [I don't mean supporting
ASCII terminals! I mean supporting ASCII as the internal character set
for files, commands, etc.] While, even if IBM agrees, it will take
years, you have to start sometime...
--
John Gilmore {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa
(C) Copyright 1986 by John Gilmore. May the Source be with you!