wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (12/02/85)
I notice that there is now a mod recipes, with some traffic in it. However, I cannot see it due to recently-imposed access restrictions on this machine. I don't know if it contains any for-real recipes yet, or just discussion about the usage of the group itself. However, though I also cannot read net.cooks directly, I have been lucky enough to get a feed of postings to that group provided to me by a generous and compassionate individual, so I will see net.cooks items. However, I am posting this not only for myself, but for others on the net who see the news via other utilities, forwardings, or on non-unix machines. If any recipe is posted to mod.recipes in an "nroff" or other typesetter or text-formatter special form, please also post the "plain" or output form of that recipe to net.cooks. (Eliminate excess blank lines and any special characters, of course.) That way, EVERYBODY, including those who don't get the "mod" groups due to USENET propagation problems, or those who cannot run the formatting program that uses the "mod.recipe" special format as input, can read the recipes and use them. It would be a shame if there are recipes posted there, and subsequent discussion based on them in net.cooks, when some net.cooks readers have never seen them (or been able to read them without difficulty, since unprocessed text with interspersed format-control codes is often terribly hard to read and understand). It would not add much to the net traffic load if those few recipes are posted twice, in different forms. I hope that this could be made a standard practice -- perhaps the moderator could process any recipes that come in to mod.recipes without having first appeared on net.cooks, and produce a simple output form and run postnews on it to send it to net.cooks, as a matter of standard practice. Regards, Will Martin UUCP/USENET: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin or ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA
reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid) (12/03/85)
I am the current moderator of mod.recipes. It is not a monarchy, and I do not claim to be its dictator--I am merely its creator, like the good Dr. Frankenstein was the creator of his monster. I am also the USENET site administrator of a backbone site; I am involved in various schemes to reduce traffic on the network. I am of two minds about posting cleartext to net.recipes. It will double the network traffic of the larger postings, and significantly increase the number of "double messages" seen by some people. On the other hand, cleartext is easier to read. There have been 6 or 7 recipes posted to mod.recipes so far. About 4 of them came from the past year of net.cooks--things that caught my eye or that I tried and liked. Mod.recipes is more than just a collection of recipes. It is a database system, including extraction programs, indexing programs, and various shell scripts to run the recipes through the roff of your choice. This way each reader of mod.recipes can produce a customized cookbook, complete with table of contents and index, that works very much the same way the Unix man pages and the unix programmer's manual work. Also I check every recipe pretty carefully, correct spelling errors, add keywords, and in general perform editorial functions. Whether or not you like the way I do it, I claim that editorial consistency in something like a cookbook is valuable. I would like to suggest two alternatives before I go posting cleartext to net.cooks: (1) I will be happy to set up a mailing list, for ARPANET/CSNET, of people who prefer to receive their mod.recipes by mail than by netnews. I would even be happy to set up a second mailing list for people who would like to reeive cleartext copies of them by ARPANET/CSNET mail. (2) You should try reading the sources as they stand, in a very stylized TRoff. They are remarkably easy to read, given that they are the input to a formatter. They aren't the sort of thing that you would want to go putting in a notebook, but I think that they are quite readable if what you're trying to do is decide whether or not you want to keep it. Now, pray tell: can you explain how it is that some site can consider net.* groups as worth letting people see, but not mod.* groups? Brian Reid Stanford -- Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA