david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) (11/21/89)
Apologies to Will
As I see it the concern over whether to start vmsnet.all or not to
start it
(ASIDE: If "they" want to start a vmsnet there's not reason
they can't do it, "we" (that is, Usenet) not only doesn't have any
enforcement body which *can* stop them but also a vmsnet.all hierarchy
is outside "our" jurisdiction)
is one of keeping Purity in the hierarchy or not keeping Purity.
On the one hand all the proposed groups for vmsnet could have a place found
for them in the Official hierarchies. That would place these groups under
the control of the Usenet Guidelines along with all the attendant problems
of newsgroup formation etc etc.
On the other hand, they can go it on their own, as they've started doing.
A lot of their potential users aren't already familiar with the needs
of running a full Usenet -- if they were presented with the idea of running
Usenet on their site they'd likely be interested until hearing how much
disk space it requires. (This site I'm posting from at a 150 meg partition
for news, and that's only good for keeping about 15-20 days worth of news...)
The other alternate hierarchies work pretty well. Most of them do anyway.
The closest example is the unix-pc hierarchy. There has been rumblings
in the past of folding that into the main stream, and really from one
point of view that would be good. But a good portion of the sites on
unix-pc are these little unix-pc's with 20 meg disks, they just can't hold
the entire Usenet hierarchies. If the unix-pc groups were folded into
the mainstream the neighbors of all these unix-pc's would have to persuade
their neighbors to set up complicated sys entries for them ... not all
administrators would be willing to do that not to mention that increasing
the complication tends to increase the failure rate.
Will it be like the /usr/group fiasco where they started with their own
hierarchy and then ended up with no traffic and folding themselves into
the mainstream as comp.org.usrgroup? I kinda doubt it if only because
there are a lot of VMS users (and sites) out there, a lot more than
there are members in /usr/group.
one last point -- with a seperate hierarchy, what does this mean for
the view that Usenet is heavily Unix oriented? Will having a vmsnet
using the same software but a different hierarchy work against that
idea or for it? A little of both maybe. Having a vmsnet will spread
the technology to a lot of new sites which weren't previously involved
with Usenet. Once they have the software in place and see how it works
they will likely want the mainstream groups. The downside is, of
course, the artificialness of the dividing line between comp.groups and
vmsnet.groups.
--
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