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.