[news.misc] Vote taking automatons

david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) (06/01/88)

[I'm cross-posting to news.misc and follow-ups to news.misc]

In article <73@carpet.WLK.COM> bill@carpet.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy) writes:
>In article <10378@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> skyler@violet.berkeley.edu () writes:
>[ a lot, not duplicated here ]
>Gosh it's a chore to tally up that stuff!  

actually the tallying would be a simple wc -l, right?  But then you really
meant something else.


>Some kind soul (Dave? Herron "one of the vertebrae" [ HUH??  :-) ]
> ... comes to mind) would
>work up something to eliminate the variants in the from path and make it
>available to the designated vote collector.  The vote collector would be
>someone that the backbone mailers could point to like a newsgroup moder-
>ator or mail maps.  That individual, armed with the path unraveler, would
>be responsible for opening the polls and closing them thirty days later
>and would post the results in a form we could all understand.

This is a very difficult job, mainly because of the lack of information.
But also different sites have different ideas of how to implement things,
and there are a lot of other variables.

egads, there's a lot to consider.

the first step is of course to prune any existing UUCP path down to
something reasonable.  But then where do you put it?  And how should
it treat mixed-mode addresses?  Then how do you know that a local-part
that looks like a uucp path is *really* a uucp path?  You don't know
that for sure.

I think I would start with an rmail like the one in MMDF.  This one
collapses the >From_'s and From_'s into one line, then it starts
at the left end, appends ".uucp" to the name, looks it up in its
database, and if the site is found it goes on.  If not it stops and
outputs a path with the previous-known-site!unknown-site!rest!user
as the address, but does it as "unknown-site!rest!user@previous-known-site".
This fails sometimes because nowadays places put full domain names
into their uucp paths and full.domain.name.uucp doesn't exist
anywhere.

That still leaves mail that gets relayed through some places and
becomes "user%site.bitnet@cunyvm.cuny.edu" (as an example) by
one path or "user@site.bitnet" through another path, or possibly
even "user@some.domain.name" through some other path.  Each are
possible given mailers that I know of depending on which path
the message took to reach the recipient.

This is where incomplete information comes in.  If I had a table
that listed all of the equivalancies between uucp names, bitnet
names and internet (er.. domain) names then I could possibly
unravel all of the variants.  Maybe.  I keep thinking of special
cases, and I have a feeling that I could get special cased to
death on this.


I think, however, that you must have meant :-)'s between every word
of the message because you go on to suggest that Bob Webber do
the physical vote taking.  While Bob has a lot of interesting points
a lot of the time I don't think he'd be the right person.  Instead
it would be best to leave it with the vote proposer as it is now.
-- 
<---- David Herron -- The E-Mail guy                         <david@ms.uky.edu>
<---- s.k.a.: David le casse\*'   {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET
<---- 
<---- Goodbye RAH.