jbuck@epimass.UUCP (Joe Buck) (08/12/86)
The following paragraph is from "Standard for Interchange of USENET
Messages", by Mark Horton. This part of the standard is violated by
2.10.2 news (I have no idea if 2.10.3 or 2.11 fix this), and the
result will bite us when we switch to the new net organization.
If an article is received with a Newsgroups line listing
some valid newsgroups and some invalid newsgroups, a site
should not remove invalid newsgroups from the list.
Instead, the invalid newsgroups should be ignored. For
example, suppose site A subscribes to the classes
``btl.all'' and ``net.all'', and exchanges news articles
with site B, which subscribes to ``net.all'' but not
``btl.all''. Suppose A receives an article with
``Newsgroups: net.micro,btl.general''. This article is
passed on to B because B receives net.micro, but B does
not receive btl.general. A must leave the Newsgroup line
unchanged. If it were to remove ``btl.general'', the
edited header could eventually reenter the ``btl.all''
class, resulting in an article that is not shown to users
subscribing to ``btl.general''. Also, followups from
outside ``btl.all'' would not be shown to such users.
In 2.10.2 news, any newsgroup not in "active" is stripped from the
header. This will wreak havoc with crosspostings after backbone
sites stop carrying "talk". For example, suppose I cross-post an
article discussing implications of Godel's theorem to sci.math and
talk.philosophy.tech. A site that doesn't pass "talk" should not
remove talk.philosophy.tech from the header, for the reasons Mark
explains above. But 2.10.2 news will do exactly that, unless all
the talk groups are in active.
Until this bug is fixed, non-leaf sites who don't intend to pass
"talk" (ditto for "rec", "soc", etc) must still have the entire
list in "active", and rely on "sys" to avoid screwing up sites
who want to receive these distributions. And this still doesn't
fix the "btl" problem Mark describes.
--
- Joe Buck {ihnp4!pesnta,oliveb,nsc!csi}!epimass!jbuck
Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, California