emv@starbarlounge.cc.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) (02/20/89)
Ken, I'm in favor of a comp.os.isis group in principle, but I'm concerned that it might not pick up the critical mass a newsgroup needs to be of continuing interest to people. If your group can put together a few 80-100 line summaries of isis work and post them to relevant groups, I think that you can probably muster up enough support to get your 100 votes to start the newsgroup. Just going from your postings in news.groups, here's what I'd like to hear more about: - availability of software. If you have a form that people have to fill out to get the stuff, then posting a copy of that form or pointing out where it's FTPable would be useful. I'd put it in comp.os.misc and comp.sources.d. - bibliographic information. Are there any published papers which describe the isis system? If so either bibliographic citations or pointers to FTPable places to get the full text would be good. - applications to particular domains. isis sounds like it has good facilities for data replication and consistency control. Has anyone prototyped name service applications with it, like X.500 or Internet DNS ? Other detailed explanations of people's work would draw some interest. - similarity to other work, if any. If you have parts of isis that draw from other operating systems ideas, say from Mach or from V, that might be a fertile ground for getting interest. - availability of 3d party software written for isis. Above the base system you'd hope to find people with reasonable applications willing to share them. If you have an anonymous FTP archive site that people can pick stuff up from, or an archive of the traffic up to now on the isis mailing list, that would be good to know. In general the newsgroup comp.os.misc would be a good place to drop information into -- though the topics in that group wander considerably, there's enough cross readership with other groups in the comp.os tree that you should see some reasonable commentary. (Most news.groups readers are in it for the interest of figuring out what to read, not so much necessarily the details of any one topic -- consider the perennial naming wars part of that.) Followups to comp.os.misc. -- Edward Vielmetti, U of Michigan