Sun-Spots-Request@Rice.edu (William LeFebvre) (11/22/88)
Welcome to the new comp.sys.sun. This will be a new experience for all of us, I am sure. This message is being sent just to the comp.sys.sun list. It serves as an introduction to the new undigested format. Even though this newsgroup will have an undigested format, the parallel Internet mailing list, Sun-Spots, will continue to be distributed in digested form. Before a digest is mailed out to the Sun-Spots recipients, it will be split up into its individual messages and each message will be posted to comp.sys.sun separately. The digests will continue to be archived at Rice. Thus, every message appearing here will be archived, and the body of the messages that appear here will be identical to the ones in the digests. The message headers will have some extra information in them to help those who want to later find a message's digest. Each message header will contain a line that looks like: X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 7, Issue 20, message 3 of 12 This tells you that the message is from Sun-Spots Digest volume 7 issue 20 (or v7n20 in shorthand). It also tells you that that issue had a total of 12 messages and that this was message #3. This information can be used by the industrious to make sure that no messages are lost. In the digest form, certain messages have an extra line that looks like "Reference: v7n9". This indicates that the message is referring to a message in a previous digest issue, specifically v7n9. This information will be carried over to the undigested comp.sys.sun. It will appear as follows: X-Issue-Reference: v7n9 I will strive to retain the subject lines, the original message ids and the references lines (a "References" line is different from the aforementioned "Reference" line). But please remember that not all messages appearing in this list were posted by Usenet readers. Some were mailed to be by Internet (Sun-Spots) readers. These message will almost certainly have no "References" line. Some of the messages in the current backlog have already had their original message-id (and and references lines) stripped. So for a time, you will see message ids that were generated by our Usenet gateway machine, "kalliope", and you won't see any "References" lines. This should only last for a few days. One unfortunate side effect of the current procedure is that the original "Organization" line is lost. All messages will have Rice University listed as the organization. This is not hard to fix, but I also don't see it as being a serious problem. If you encounter any problems with this new arrangement, or if you have any ideas to help improve the comp.sys.sun service, please send them along to the address "sun-spots-request@rice.edu". If you think they are of general interest to the entire readership, then just post them to this list. Remember that all postings still get forwarded to me. This list is still moderated. I hope that this new format is satisfactory. I know that many people have been wanting this for a long time. Now it is finally happening. William LeFebvre Sun-Spots moderator Department of Computer Science Rice University <phil@Rice.edu>