jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck) (08/11/90)
{ I wrote }
>The bug happened because the current software propogates bogus control
>messages. If it threw them away instead with a message on stderr when
>you tried to post one, the original sender would have gotten an error
>message and no cruft would have been sent out to other systems.
In article <9008100218.AA23766@mindcrf.mindcraft.com>,
karish@mindcrf.UUCP writes:
> And it would be practically impossible to add a new control message
> to the currently-recognized set.
It already is. Let's say you wanted to add a new control message called
"link", to be used as follows:
Control: link <message-id> newsgroup
This control message would install a cross-post "after the fact" so a
previously posted article would appear in the new group. It could be
used to create "best-of" groups, for example. You could do a group like
comp.archives without reposting the articles (for this, you'd want "link"
to have an alternate syntax that would allow a lot of message-ID's in the
body). You could do summaries of other groups as well. The idea would
be that people would keep the "summary" groups around longer; only the
moderator of a "summary" group would post these control messages.
People could set up "accolade" systems on their own if they wanted to.
For example, suppose I decided I only wanted to see comp.arch articles
that John Mashey thought were worthwhile. We'd give him a little tool
to mark the good messages (possibly with an rn macro so he could hit
one key to say a message was "worthy"). He'd send out these link
messages to his fan list, and they could set up recnews to post link
control messages with a local distribution.
People like Geoff Goodfellow could use this to do their "in moderation
news" stuff. The question of their right to do so would easily be
solved -- just copyright your "link" control message (sorry, Patrick)!
On the existing net, if you attempted to add this message, news admins
from all systems that didn't have the new control message in their news
would get lots of mail about it.
With my change, the message would not propogate beyond a system that
didn't have link installed. This isn't a disaster and makes it no more
difficult to add new control messages; it does mean that you don't get
control messages that your upstream sites don't recognize. So adding
new control messages is orthogonal to the issue of whether you propogate
control messages you don't recognize.
--
Joe Buck
jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu {uunet,ucbvax}!galileo.berkeley.edu!jbuck cdr@hobbes.amd.com (Carl Rigney) (08/12/90)
In article <38081@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck) writes: >In article <9008100218.AA23766@mindcrf.mindcraft.com>, >karish@mindcrf.UUCP writes: >> And it would be practically impossible to add a new control message >> to the currently-recognized set. > >It already is. Let's say you wanted to add a new control message called >"link", to be used as follows: > >Control: link <message-id> newsgroup > >This control message would install a cross-post "after the fact" so a >previously posted article would appear in the new group. That's an inappropriate use for control messages, and an invitation to chaos. Instead just add a newsgroup alt.approved (say) and put hooks in the newsreader so someone can post a message to alt.approved that lists the message-ids of all the messages he liked in this session (listing one message-id per message would be horrible) and another hook so someone else can follow those message-ids. People who don't want to deal with that just don't carry the new newsgroup. One new newsgroup, instead of hundreds. I'm not saying that even that method of implementation is a good idea. While I'd certainly like to be able to read all the articles a John Mashey or Larry Wall found insightful without wading through the noise, its a fairly major change to the way the Net works now. Control messages should be relatively rare. Things which are not rare should not be control messages. Its perfectly OK for a news administrator interface to turn a local Cancel into cancel or ask the admin what he meant; its completely bogus for news software to guess at what someone *might* have meant; there are too many ways to make a mistake! Properly designed software (which I believe Cnews to be) should log errors and send a notification to someone that there was a problem; not-quite-so-well designed software sends an error message for each error (flood that mailbox!), poorly designed software ignores errors, and horribly designed software dies on errors. -- Carl Rigney cdr@amdcad.AMD.COM {ames decwrl pyramid sun uunet}!amdcad!cdr "Its just news."