eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond) (08/05/88)
In article <4741@rpp386.uucp>, jfh@rpp386.UUCP (The Beach Bum) writes: > how about a new feature where each group > (possibly, maybe entire hierarchies instead?) has a default > distribution. I say this is the Right Thing, because it lets each site set policy rather than trying to write some set of defaults into stone. I have implemented something like this this for Patch #5 of the news 3.0 beta. I already had a thing called an 'admin' file that holds various per-group flags and per-group expiration times. The way the syntax looks is: <subscription1> <flags1> <subscription1> <flags1> : <subscriptionN> <flagsN> where the subscriptions are scanned in sequence. Here's what my admin file looked like: all 14v comp.sources.{unix,games} !v news.lists !v news.software.b !v comp.mail.maps !v This sets a default of 14-day expiration time with volatile on ('volatile' is an attribute useful for small sites that causes articles to become expireable as soon as all subscribers have read them). Then it turnns volatile off for a few groups. It was nearly trivial to add a default distribution field to the syntax. This improves on John Haugh's proposal by making it easy to specify default distributions for whole classes of groups. Now, my admin file looks like this: all 14v world comp.sources.{unix,games} !v news.lists !v news.software.b !v comp.mail.maps !v misc.forsale v nj,pa,ny and it does exactly what you think it does. Yet another nifty news feature brought to you by the friendly folks at Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories -- sign up today for your very own copy of our luxurious beta distribution. Next week: V7-format mailboxes as pseudo-newsgroups? Maybe...stay tuned! -- Eric S. Raymond (the mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews) UUCP: ..!{uunet,att,rutgers!vu-vlsi}!snark!eric @nets: eric@snark.UUCP Post: 22 South Warren Avenue, Malvern, PA 19355 Phone: (215)-296-5718