perlman@wanginst.UUCP (Gary Perlman) (11/04/85)
First, the usual set of disclaimers. 1. This belongs in net.news.group or something like that, but I don't read that group. cc comments to me. 2. I don't want to post this, but I like net.sources. I don't want it to go away. 3. I don't know how much it costs the backbone sites, or us, to carry news. I appreciate it, but claim ignorance. I think that net.sources is worth keeping because of its role as an informal medium for sharing ideas, especially for group program writing. Let me provide a scenario, a useful program like "less" is written and posted to net.sources. Many sites find it useful and make suggestions to the author. The author makes changes and posts the new version to the net. The process continues for several cycles, and we have a much improved program. The attraction of net.sources to me is that it is transient and informal. Yes, there are many buggy programs, and I prefer not to read the commentaries, but I LIKE to be able to get comments on my programs and I LIKE to be able to comment on other people's programs. The problem I see with mod.sources is that it is less likely that a program author will post new versions. I had a strange feeling when I saw the list of the mod.sources archive. I like the idea of archives, but to see versions 1, 2, and so on seems odd, especially when there are branches as well as archives. Another thing I do not like about mod.sources is that I have always had problems posting to the moderator, and I think about 1 of three submissions showed up there. I don't think it was because of the moderator's actions, but because the submissions never got there. Perhaps some better instructions would help, but documentation has never been a strong point on UNIX. I would like to see something like net.sources stay around. I don't mind if it is moderated to see if the submission contains source code, but I would like it to be pretty open. How about: mod.sources mod.sources.archive mod.sources.forum mod.sources.bugs mod.sources.followup Bonus comment: The descriptions of the newsgroups in net.announce.newusers are not very informative. There are many descriptios like: net.pc.xyzzy discussions about xyzzy pc's The phrase "discussions about" should be dropped, because we already know that. Something more informative that xyzzy, perhaps company name, should be added. This is a boring job that would take a few hours at most, but it would be useful. Probably everything I've said is naive. Sorry. -- Gary Perlman Wang Institute Tyngsboro, MA 01879 (617) 649-9731 UUCP: decvax!wanginst!perlman CSNET: perlman@wanginst