phil@amd.UUCP (Phil Ngai) (10/15/84)
Here's an idea I just had. My understanding of the reason news users
get articles with "Orphaned Response" for a subject line is that
when a msg comes into a notes system, it gets sent out with
an "Orphaned Response" subject line if the parent (base) note isn't
there. When the base note does come in, then users on the notes system
get the correct subject line but their news neighbors don't edit the
followup article's subject line even when the parent article comes in.
One approach would be for notes to hold the followup until the base
note came in, then the followup would have the correct subject.
Another approach would be for news to go edit the followup article's
subject line when the base note came in.
Finally, notes could avoid stripping the subject line on the followup
when it entered the notes system. I assume that the followup has the
correct subject line at some point because it had to be generated as
a response to a base note and both news and notes can do that correctly.
Then again, I could be all wet in my understanding of notes.
It would help if people would run a modern version of uucp that
sends things out in the order generated.
from the rice eater
--
Phil Ngai (408) 982-6554
UUCPnet: {ucbvax,decwrl,ihnp4,allegra,intelca}!amd!phil
ARPAnet: amd!phil@decwrl.ARPAgordon@sneaky.UUCP (10/19/84)
> Here's an idea I just had. My understanding of the reason news users > get articles with "Orphaned Response" for a subject line is that > when a msg comes into a notes system, it gets sent out with > an "Orphaned Response" subject line if the parent (base) note isn't > there. When the base note does come in, then users on the notes system > get the correct subject line but their news neighbors don't edit the > followup article's subject line even when the parent article comes in. > > One approach would be for notes to hold the followup until the base > note came in, then the followup would have the correct subject. Contrary to some of the wording in the notes documentation, Orphaned Responses rarely occur because "the response arrives before the base note". Notes does not have the equivalent of the "L" flag. In order to respond to a note, the note has to be at the system the response is entered on. From then on, the response should travel to other systems along with or behind the base note, since if a system is going to send the response, it will also send the base note along with it, unless it already sent it there earlier, the base note was written on the destination system, or the base note was received from the destination. The exceptions all supposedly mean that the destination already has the base note. There are two main reasons I know of for Orphaned responses: Either the base note is never going to get there, because uucp or something else trashed it, or the base note was there, but got expired before the response arrived. If everyone expires notes at two weeks, and it takes 8 days for a note to go across the notes net, and the response takes 8 days to get back, the original note will have vanished on the system it was posted on, assuming nobody else replied (Notes expires notes based on the arrival date of the note or latest response. Even with a 2-week expiration date, hot topics in net.flame with lots of responses can stick around for months). The response shows up there as orphaned. If that system or one close is a gateway, it goes into news orphaned. Flames sent to the author of the response about writing an orphaned response are not going to help any, because the author has no idea it went out that way, nor can he/she control it. Lots of the notes systems do not run news at all. I THINK I know who gateways my stuff into news, but I can't prove it. I am not absolutely sure that anyone does. This also means that if my article is gatewayed by very dumb gateway software, I can't change it by updating my site. (Someone want to send me a copy of this article's headers, once it gets into news?) Orphaned responses will occur momentarily if uucp manages to shuffle the order of transmission of batches of notes. However, unless "newsoutput" (the notes -> news gateway program that calls inews) is run between the arrival of the second and first batch, these won't be transmitted into the news system as an "Orphaned Response", they will be transmitted with the proper title. I doubt anyone runs newsoutput more than once an hour. If I had to guess, I would estimate about 4 times a day. > Another approach would be for news to go edit the followup article's > subject line when the base note came in. This sounds incredibly messy. You would have to keep track of whether the article had been orphaned, but wasn't any more, and whether the orphan had been sent into news (no point editing if it wasn't). You would need some way to find the article in the news system. Also, it would tend not to work, given the existing nature of news. If inews is queueing a copy of the article immediately, (no batchers or U flag), then editing the header in the gateway system would fix it for that system only. News has no provision for sending an update to an article using the same article-id, it would just get dumped as a duplicate article. If batchers or the U flag are being used, then the base note needs to show up before anyone transmits a batch or picks up the articles. Same problem, except a bit longer window during which the title could be properly inserted. Somehow I doubt that sending out a cancel message and transmitting a new copy of the message would be effective. (Cancel messages tend to be ineffective for the same reason that updating an article would be: you can take the article out of the news directory, but you can't zap the copy already in the uucp spool directory. If the cancel message manages to get ahead of the article, it will cancel nothing, and then the article shows up, and stays on the system.) Mostly people would complain about seeing articles twice. > Finally, notes could avoid stripping the subject line on the followup > when it entered the notes system. I assume that the followup has the > correct subject line at some point because it had to be generated as > a response to a base note and both news and notes can do that correctly. The notes format does not contain a place for a subject line in responses. Unless you want it duplicated in the text, which is almost as bad as the "#" line notes used to (I think the new gateway stuff fixed this) stick into the text of articles, there just isn't a place to put it. All it has is a pointer to the parent article. Changing this would cause considerable compatability problems and disruption because systems continued to run old versions. Does this sound familiar to anyone in news-land? What would happen if, to meet a new standard, every news system had to add a Line-Eater-Bug-Not-Present-At: line, or the article would get dumped at the next site down the line? What happens if your neighbor insists on running news 2.6? Also, the title is redundant information, and increases transmission time and disk storage. Does news want to add Parent-Article-Subject: headers? Also, nobody has time to modify the code, and various other excuses. > Then again, I could be all wet in my understanding of notes. Well, your suggestions weren't unreasonable for someone not familiar with the innards of notes. > It would help if people would run a modern version of uucp that > sends things out in the order generated. If all the files get transmitted in the same call, I don't think that this problem causes many Orphaned Responses. It is irritating to see News-originated articles with the response article immediately preceeding the parent, (notes can't pair up an article and a reply if it wasn't a followup, or the gateway software is stupid) but that's a different problem. It bothers notes and news users alike. > Phil Ngai (408) 982-6554 > UUCPnet: {ucbvax,decwrl,ihnp4,allegra,intelca}!amd!phil > ARPAnet: amd!phil@decwrl.ARPA Gordon Burditt convex!ctvax!trsvax!sneaky!gordon microsoft!trsvax!sneaky!gordon
crl@pur-phy.UUCP (Charles LaBrec) (10/22/84)
We once ran notes, but dropped it when it became too much of a hassle to keep up. (I won't go into the reasons now, because all this does is promote a flaming session. Let me just say that we felt the huge advantage then of the user interface was not greater than the other disadvantages.) I make this statement to show that I at one time had knowledge of the internals of notesfiles. Now, I just wanted to address the problem of orphaned responses. I see no problem with eliminating these titles. When an "orphaned" response comes in, notesfiles generates a "fake" basenote for it to be a response of (at least, this was my understanding back then). Therefore, it should be possible to create a "fake" basenote, with a "proper" title. As a side note, now with the advent of "rn", I REALLY see no reason to run notesfiles. Rn gives you everything you want, plus more. Plus, it is completely compatible with the news system used in the majority of sites, since it is only a news reader, and relies on inews, etc., for the hard work. Hat's off to Larry Wall!!! Charles LaBrec UUCP: pur-ee!Physics:crl, purdue!Physics:crl INTERNET: crl @ pur-phy.UUCP
gordon@sneaky.UUCP (10/25/84)
> Now, I just wanted to address the problem of orphaned responses. I see > no problem with eliminating these titles. When an "orphaned" response > comes in, notesfiles generates a "fake" basenote for it to be a response > of (at least, this was my understanding back then). Therefore, it should > be possible to create a "fake" basenote, with a "proper" title. Have you got a program that takes the text (note: NO HEADERS) of a response, who originated it, when it was posted, what group it's in, and a notes id number of the base note, which is NOT available for reference, and generates a title? The transmission of a response does NOT include a title. If it did, the problem would never have appeared in the first place. I'd be interested in seeing a program that assigns titles. It might even do a better job than the humans and AI projects do giving titles to their own articles. Or is it your suggestion that "Re: Orphaned Response" simply be changed to "Re: 'Proper' Title"? How about a Random Title Generator? I can think of a few degenerate cases where you could generate a reasonably appropriate title. In net.general, ALL titles should be of the form "Inappropriate posting from kremvax!kgb", since I have yet to see anything of truly general interest in net.general. Most of Mark Horton's stuff comes close, but it still doesn't fit. I can't even think of anything that IS of general interest to such a varied audience. No, not even "Nuclear War Destroys World", or "USENET confiscated for copyright violations". In net.flame, most titles could just as well be "Yet more drivel from myvax!umberhulk". > As a side note, now with the advent of "rn", I REALLY see no reason > to run notesfiles. Rn gives you everything you want, plus more. Plus, > it is completely compatible with the news system used in the majority > of sites, since it is only a news reader, and relies on inews, etc., for > the hard work. Hat's off to Larry Wall!!! It's rather difficult to run news if you don't have any news feeds within affordable distance (local call in 817 area code), because everyone else is running notes, and all you have to interface news with is the really old and horrible notes/news interface. (Why isn't news compatable with the notes transfer format? :-) ) Running both takes up a lot of disk space. The notes/news interface requires some hacking to make it ship stuff that came from news back into it, because it doesn't understand that this news doesn't have anyone else to connect to. (Offers of long-distance news connections appreciated but not accepted, I can't afford the phone bills). Also, my version of rn still dumps core occasionally. Larry Wall did a fantastic job in trying to make rn portable, and from what I have seen, the user interface is excellent, too. I think there are a few bugs still lurking around, and I'm still not sure it beats notes. I don't have it working to the point I can believe it really works grouping topics together as well as notes does. There are a few things I'd really like to know how to do with news. Supposing I had several news connections, and I get mail from one of them saying, "My disk overflowed. Please resend everything from last night on.". This is likely to happen often, considering the small disks on many of the systems around here. How would I do this? And how do I get around the 65535 inodes per filesystem restriction in v7 or 4.1bsd, which news is likely to keep exceeding if I try to save certain groups for a long time? I'm sure someone has gotten around these, but I haven't learned all the tricks that aren't stated in the documentation, but well known to veteran news administrators. > Charles LaBrec > UUCP: pur-ee!Physics:crl, purdue!Physics:crl > INTERNET: crl @ pur-phy.UUCP Gordon Burditt convex!ctvax!trsvax!sneaky!gordon microsoft!trsvax!sneaky!gordon
crl@pur-phy.UUCP (Charles LaBrec) (10/29/84)
>Have you got a program that takes the text (note: NO HEADERS) of a response, >who originated it, when it was posted, what group it's in, and a notes >id number of the base note, which is NOT available for reference, and >generates a title? The transmission of a response does NOT include a title. >If it did, the problem would never have appeared in the first place. That's true, I had forgotten about the case where notesfiles sites transfer articles between one another in notesfiles format. However, I think that the majority of the problem occurs at the notes/news interfaces, since I feel that it is extremely simple for replies to arrive before the basenote from news rather than notes. It could at least be fixed at these points. >It's rather difficult to run news if you don't have any news feeds within >affordable distance (local call in 817 area code), because everyone else is >running notes, and all you have to interface news with is the really old >and horrible notes/news interface. True, if you have no choice, you're stuck. We kept both versions around for about a year, and two copies of the junk is just too much wasted disk space. >Also, my version of rn still dumps core occasionally. Larry Wall did a >fantastic job in trying to make rn portable, and from what I have seen, the >user interface is excellent, too. I think there are a few bugs still lurking >around, and I'm still not sure it beats notes. I don't have it working to >the point I can believe it really works grouping topics together as well as >notes does. Bugs #1-#19 have been posted that fix most of the problems found. (One more is lurking, waiting for the "official" fix. Raise the declaration of filename[] in filexp() in intrp.c to LBUFLEN from MAXFILENAME until something better comes along.) We run on a PDP-11/44 and right now rn is very stable. As to whether it beats notesfiles, I think so, but that's just my opinion. > Gordon Burditt > convex!ctvax!trsvax!sneaky!gordon > microsoft!trsvax!sneaky!gordon Charles LaBrec UUCP: pur-ee!Physics:crl, purdue!Physics:crl INTERNET: crl @ pur-phy.UUCP
berry@zinfandel.UUCP (Berry Kercheval) (10/31/84)
In article <-1025373@sneaky.UUCP> gordon@sneaky.UUCP writes: > >Have you got a program that takes the text (note: NO HEADERS) of a response, >who originated it, when it was posted, what group it's in, and a notes >id number of the base note, which is NOT available for reference, and >generates a title? The transmission of a response does NOT include a title. >If it did, the problem would never have appeared in the first place. Yes, transmission of a response from a notes system to anther notes system does not include a title. That is not the problem here! The problem is that when a response goes out into the NEWS world, it has a title "Re: Original Subject - (nf)". When it goes into another NOTES system, newsinput (the news/notes gateway program) says to itself, "Aha! This news article is a NOTES response. I don't have a base note for it and will create an empty one. Since this is an orphaned response, I will title the new empty base note "Orphaned Response" and THROW AWAY THE PERFECTLY GOOD TITLE I ALREADY HAVE" This is very easy to fix. I can send diff listings to any system administrators who request them. -- Berry Kercheval Zehntel Inc. (ihnp4!zehntel!zinfandel!berry) (415)932-6900
essick@uiucdcsb.UUCP (11/01/84)
A new version of the notesfile/news gateway programs "newsinput" and "newsoutput" written mostly by Tw Cook at HP and Lou Salkind at NYU manages to keep the titles. newsinput was originally a quick, cheap and very dirty (probably even filthy) program to "get the job done". It worked with A-news format and made assumptions about things arriving in order. "Newsoutput" was almost as bad (although it was more coherent). The new version is much better organized, understands and generates USENET compatible headers, and doesn't through away as much information as it used to. Tw and Lou did a wonderful job of fixing it up. I will probably be posting the current notesfile source & documentation to net.sources in the next month. -- Ray Essick, University of Illinois