pell@isy.liu.se (P{r Emanuelsson) (12/02/88)
rcardena%oracle.uucp@hplabs.hp.com writes: >But I've also seen distributions of "gnu" and "news". These are >newsgroup hierarchies. I'm confused. How do I know what the valid >"distributions" are? Since this is something I've thought of posting about for some time, I'll post my thoughts on the matter. The Distribution: should only be used to limit distribution to a certain area, geographically, organizationally, etc. It's useless to write e.g. "news", since this is implicit from the name of the newsgroup. If a site receives news.*, it will receive the article regardless of the distribution, and if the site doesn't receive news.*, the article is dumped, again regardless of the distribution. I think we should blame B-news for this situation, since it confuses newsgroup names with distributions, matching them against the same record in the "sys" file, which is wrong. This didn't matter much before, but with the arrival of C-news a distinction was made between group names and distributions. With a correct "sys" file for C-news, an article with distribution "news" will be junked. I first noticed this behaviour when all of the articles in rec.mag.otherrealms were junked. Sure, they had distribution "rec" on them... (no offense intended, Chuq!) Obviously, since I read your article, I had to give up the nice (and correct) C-news scheme. But not completely; I have set up so that nothing will leave this machine with an incorrect distribution. I encourage others to do the same. Remember: the problem will only get worse! C-news has the potential of doing it right, and so does News 3.0, I think. All they need is the right configuration! /Pell -- "Don't think; let the machine do it for you!" -- E. C. Berkeley Dept. of Electrical Engineering ====>>> pell@isy.liu.se University of Linkoping, Sweden ...!uunet!enea!isy.liu.se!pell