west@sdcsla.UUCP (Larry West) (06/21/85)
How about having an article number zero (or one) in each newsgroup,
which always exists, and serves as an introduction to that group?
It could include a description, name of moderator, etc.
Obviously, this would have to be distributed with the news software,
and would need to be updated specially (control messages?). And "rn"
and whatever else people use to read news would have to know to
always show that message when someone read the group for the first
time (this might not take any change), or when it changed (this probably
would take a change).
Comments? Particularly from those overworked people who actually
implement the net?
--
Larry West Institute for Cognitive Science
(USA+619-)452-6220 UC San Diego (mailcode C-015) [x6220]
ARPA: <west@nprdc.ARPA> La Jolla, CA 92093 U.S.A.
UUCP: {ucbvax,sdcrdcf,decvax,ihnp4}!sdcsvax!sdcsla!west OR ulysses!sdcsla!westlwall@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Larry Wall) (06/22/85)
It would take a certain amount of work do make rn treat article 0 as the
"newsgroup charter", for several reasons. Article number 0 tends to get
used as a conventional value indicating no article number at all. Reserving
article 1 instead of article 0 would help that. There are also difficulties
with keeping a bit in the "has-this-article-been-read" bitmap for an article
with a number less than the minimum stored in the active file. There are
heuristics for keeping the length of .newsrc lines down by scanning the
directory for unexpired articles, and these might need to be taught about
article 0 or 1.
It's a pretty good idea, but the patch isn't trivial.
Larry Wall
{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,sdcsvax}!sdcrdcf!lwallhokey@plus5.UUCP (Hokey) (06/23/85)
The concept of permanent articles is a good one, but there are several obstacles to be overcome. It has been discussed before, but never went very far. First, 1 article is not enough. I would think that 10 *should* be, and 100 *better* be, but who can tell? It might be better if we separated the "permanent" articles from the "regular" articles by a mechanism distinct from regular article numbers. Perhaps they could have a leading or trailing "." on them, or have a 0 prepended (e.g.: for a group with 3 permanent articles, the numbers would be 01, 02, and 03). The first article could be a "table of contents" for the current group's permanent articles. Second, there is a problem with transmission. The current default news distribution looks to see of the article is "here". If so, it is not sent "downstream". This means that new sites will not get the permanent articles until they change. Granted, the articles could be posted anew every month (with a small change, to force netwide updates), but that would increase net traffic and prevent users at new sites from seeing the very directions the rest of us want them to see. The second problem should be solved with a "better" mechanism for handling article transmission. The IHAVE/SENDME protocol comes to mind, although the overhead is a bit high. Note, however, that this transmission mechanism would ensure that all the news was distributed properly, and we could avoid all the "I never saw part 3 of Hack" and "garbled" article problems we now have. (It would also be nice if site A could see which newsgroups were fed to it by upstream sites, so folks could see where, for example, net.sources.games was shut off. While I have no objection to sites who shut off news groups, it would be best if their downstream neighbors were actively told about the situation so they could get alternative feeds if they so wished.) To a great extent, solutions to these problems are hampered by the batch nature of UUCP. A replacement for UUCP which would permit "interactive" channels and an overall layered approach to the task of inter-machine communications would be of great help. What ever happened to the stuff written in Australia (a replacement for UUCP)? -- Hokey ..ihnp4!plus5!hokey 314-725-9492
bill@persci.UUCP (06/24/85)
In article <905@sdcsla.UUCP> west@sdcsla.UUCP (Larry West) writes: >How about having an article number zero (or one) in each newsgroup, >which always exists, and serves as an introduction to that group? >[...] I think it's a *great* idea! It might help avoid a lot of the incorrectly posted articles we've seen lately, although it probably won't keep AT&T people from advertising their houses-for-sale in net.misc! -- Bill Swan {ihnp4,decvax,allegra,...}!uw-beaver!tikal!persci!bill
chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) (06/24/85)
In article <905@sdcsla.UUCP> west@sdcsla.UUCP (Larry West) writes: >How about having an article number zero (or one) in each newsgroup, >which always exists, and serves as an introduction to that group? >It could include a description, name of moderator, etc. Actually, this already exists for some groups, because when they were created the creator sent out a note with an Expires: line in it well into the future. We could probably collect a set of charters for distribution with future news releases and write a shell script to install them without much problem. The hooks, for once, are already in there! >And "rn" >and whatever else people use to read news would have to know to >always show that message when someone read the group for the first >time (this might not take any change), or when it changed (this probably >would take a change). All you would really need to do is send out cancel messages on the old one and send out a new one with a long expiration date to make the switch. Shouldn't require a lot of hassle to the code, thank GLOS. >Comments? Particularly from those overworked people who actually >implement the net? There are a few caveats I ought to mention before we all go out and celebrate: o Notes is an unknown. It may not acknowledge Expires: lines, and get rid of the article anyway. Since notes are a significant subset of the net, this wouldn't help a significant subset of the net. o Old news (A news, for instance) doesn't understand the Expires: line, either. See above note. o If you set the -i or -I flag of expire, the Expires: line is ignored and the article goes bye-bye. This is used by some sites on a regular basis, by others when disk space is really tight. The charters go away when this happens. o Some systems use find to get rid of old articles, because the expire program used to be REAL flakey. 'find -ctime +30' does an even better job than 'expire -I' because you don't even need them to be in history file to get them. Overall, though, sounds like it might be a good idea. It can be implemented in place, so we don't need people to upgrade software for it to work, and it'll probably work for some period of time on most sites. Perhaps we want to post them on a regular basis, say every six months or so... -- :From the misfiring synapses of: Chuq Von Rospach {cbosgd,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!nsc!chuqui nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA The offices were very nice, and the clients were only raping the land, and then, of course, there was the money...
smk@axiom.UUCP (Steven M. Kramer) (06/25/85)
Larry's idea of an article 0 sounds great to me. I certainly is
1. conceptually clean, and
2. easy to automate.
When a group starts up, the control message can contain the article 0,
and another control message can override it. This can be applied to
mod.all groups and fa.all groups to include the name/addr of the
moderator, so that changing moderators can be done pretty easily by
updating the moderator name. (Maybe this can be used to force news
to reply to the moderator mentioned there rather than following up in
the usual way.)
Thanx, Larry. Good one.
--
--steve kramer
{allegra,genrad,ihnp4,utzoo,philabs,uw-beaver}!linus!axiom!smk (UUCP)
linus!axiom!smk@mitre-bedford (MIL)uddeborg@chalmers.UUCP (G|ran Uddeborg) (06/26/85)
Let me suggest the following:
1) Convince expire to ignore article number 1.
2) Update the "motng"(?) by sending a normal article with a special
header line. (The control line?) The effect of this is to store
this article both as a normal article, and as article number 1.
The changes to expire are simple. Some work needs to be done to recognize
the new type of control message, but this too should be fairly simple. Rn
doesn't need to be changed at all. If we want the Xref feature to work for
this kind of article, not too important, these patches needs to be changed
somewhat, though.
--
"For me, UNIX is a (way of) being."
G|ran Uddeborg
UUCP: {seismo,philabs,decvax}!{mcvax,ukc,unido}!enea!chalmers!uddeborg
CSnet: uddeborg@chalmers.csnetjohn@basser.oz (John Mackin) (06/26/85)
In article <779@plus5.UUCP> hokey@plus5.UUCP (Hokey) writes: > What ever happened to the stuff > written in Australia (a replacement for UUCP)? You mean SUN III? We're all running it. Nothing bad has happened to it. It has just got steadily better. We have a link to Bell Labs that also runs it. I could go on at length about why it's better than UUCP, but this article would get too long. There is no reason that SUN III can't completely replace UUCP (in theory). In practice, it seems that as everyone gets UUCP free with their UNIX, whereas we would like to charge a nominal fee to commercial organizations for SUN III, it isn't going to take off in the US. Too bad. Everyone here loves it. If you want licensing or other info on SUN III, please mail Dr. Bob Kummerfeld, ...!seismo!munnari!basser.oz!bob. John Mackin, Basser Department of Computer Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia UUCP: ...!decvax!mulga!basser.oz!john ...!seismo!munnari!basser.oz!john (faster) ARPA: munnari!basser.oz!john@SEISMO.ARPA
dsp@ptsfa.UUCP (David St. Pierre) (06/27/85)
Rather than use article 0, is there any simple way of using a file
similar to "distributions"? That is, a file of newsgroups for which
a "charter" is available? The charter would be displayed the first
time one subscribes to a newsgroup, maybe when one re-subscribes
to it, or when someone wants "help".
I thought this would provide the advantage of not getting involved
with expire. A replacement strategy might be developed by routing
new charters to some specialized newsgroup with (I'm probably way
off base) a cmsg. Nobody's really decided how OFTEN these charters
would change, so even something as boring as posting a regular news
article for digestion by the news SA wouldn't be too difficult. It
would also make packaging in new releases of netnews pretty easy
and not disturb old versions.
A last possible advantage is that this would be fairly easy to create
different versions of charters, or ignore them altogether if some SA
didn't feel they were appropriate. I'm wondering who is going to
write the definitive charter for net.misc.
--
David St. Pierre {ihnp4,dual}!ptsfa!dspdsp@ptsfa.UUCP (David St. Pierre) (06/27/85)
> > Rather than use article 0, is there any simple way of using a file > similar to "distributions"? Sorry, I meant the "recording" file used by postnews. It also struck me that it might be a lot easier to implement a control-file method without worrying about the impact of permanent postings on any existing news software. The change could potentially appear in, say, rn a lot sooner than vnews because it would be transparent to vnews/expire/readnews et. al. -- David St. Pierre {ihnp4,dual}!ptsfa!dsp