chip@ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg) (11/21/89)
According to sartin@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM (Rob Sartin): >In some areas we see various modifications to systems to work around the >fact that hierarchies don't model reality well. [...] >The Unix filesystem has symbolic links and hard links. >C++, in its evolution from 1.2 to 2.0, added multiple inheritance >which (at least) made inheritance a DAG instead of a tree. > >The news software and users needs a method for jumping out of the system >(of hierarchies) when it appears to be inadequate. Actually, the news software does provide mechanisms for bypassing the news hierarchy when necessary: 1. Crossposting. Rather like Unix hard links, in that an article exists equally in all the named groups. 2. Aliasing. The news administrator may set up an alias for a newsgroup. Depending on the news version, an alias may or may not modify the article header. Rather like Unix soft links. Sample aliases: mod.sources comp.sources.unix sci.aquaria alt.aquaria 3. Followup-To. Says that this article may be cross-posted, but continued discussion should go to a particular place. I wonder what further escapes from the hierarchy are needed. -- You may redistribute this article only to those who may freely do likewise. Chip Salzenberg at A T Engineering; <chip@ateng.com> or <uunet!ateng!chip> "Did I ever tell you the Jim Gladding story about the binoculars?"
peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) (11/21/89)
In article <25684CEF.26422@ateng.com> chip@ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg) writes: > 1. Crossposting. Rather like Unix hard links,... More like soft links, since you can link across hierarchies, distributions, administrative groups, etc... > 2. Aliasing. ... Rather like Unix soft links. ... And this is more like file system mounts. It's something the administrator does, users can't, and generally users don't care about it so long as they don't run out of disk space. > I wonder what further escapes from the hierarchy are needed. Merged groups, perhaps? Brad's keyword searching stuff? Who knows... how about the other hierarchies in News: threads and message chains? -- `-_-' Peter da Silva <peter@ficc.uu.net> <peter@sugar.lonestar.org>. 'U` -------------- +1 713 274 5180. "ERROR: trust not in UUCP routing tables" -- MAILER-DAEMON@mcsun.EU.net
sartin@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM (Rob Sartin) (11/28/89)
In article <7068@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes: >Merged groups, perhaps? Brad's keyword searching stuff? Who >knows... how about the other hierarchies in News: threads and >message chains? I always liked the idea of the keyword searching, but it has a fatal flaw: the people writing the articles aren't qualified to write the keywords. It may be possible to get a pretty high quality filter (better than choosing groups anyway) by having software guess at the keywords based on the contents of the article. It might be a fun thing to prototype. Threads and message chains are more accurately modeled as DAG's than as hierarchies (and I wish the news readers supported that!). Rob Sartin internet: sartin@hplabs.hp.com Software Technology Lab uucp : hplabs!sartin Hewlett-Packard voice : (415) 857-7592