[news.software.b] Separate newsgroup & distribution fields in sys file

eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond) (06/15/88)

In article <4092@fluke.com>, battan@tc.fluke.COM (Jim Battan) writes:
>It may be too late to get 3.0 or C news to make the sys file cleaner
>(I'm not sure what they look like).  If not, this is my plea to change it.

News 3.0 does this right. The newsgroup and distributions are separate
fields in its sys format, and thus implicitly separate namespaces.

I'm still waiting on the NNTP/NFS changes from Erik Fair and Mel Pleasant
before releasing. If I don't get them soon, I'm going to release anyhow.
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      Eric S. Raymond                     (the mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews)
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henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (06/18/88)

> >It may be too late to get 3.0 or C news to make the sys file cleaner
> 
> News 3.0 does this right. The newsgroup and distributions are separate
> fields in its sys format, and thus implicitly separate namespaces.

The C News crew felt constrained by compatibility, but we too did
implement this:  if there is a slash (/) in the first field of the sys
file, the stuff before it is groups and the stuff after is distributions.
Works fine, don't know how we ever lived without it.  (It happened long
enough ago to be in the alpha release, by the way.)
-- 
Man is the best computer we can      |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
put aboard a spacecraft. --Von Braun | {ihnp4,decvax,uunet!mnetor}!utzoo!henry

jos@philapd.UUCP (Jos Vos) (06/20/88)

In article <dPems#33EyJR=eric@snark.UUCP> eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond) writes:
>In article <4092@fluke.com>, battan@tc.fluke.COM (Jim Battan) writes:
>>It may be too late to get 3.0 or C news to make the sys file cleaner
>>(I'm not sure what they look like).  If not, this is my plea to change it.
>
>News 3.0 does this right. The newsgroup and distributions are separate
>fields in its sys format, and thus implicitly separate namespaces.

Marvelous: after my first (or maybe second... :-) ) look at Netnews I asked
several people: does this (distr/group matching) really work this way?
Most of them even couldn't give me the answer !?!?

Did you include a wildcard, e.g. 'all' for matching distributions?
Did you change the wildcard matching for groups?
Now 'all' matches really all groups, but 'all' in combination with
another token, e.g. comp.all, only matches one token.

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