draper (01/15/83)
This note is asking that Someone Who Knows post a short situation report on net.sources answering the following points: 1) Roughly what areas of the net do not get net.sources? 2) Typically why don't they? 3) What is the official attitude to the failure of usenet for the second most important newsgroup? 4) What is the best alternative approved way of distributing sources? The rest of this note simply asks these questions at greater length (though more eloquently I hope). ============================= I have got a lot of requests recently for the sources of a program I posted to net.sources. While this is flattering, and shows that people all over the US have read my contribution, it is disturbing that netnews is apparently not properly distributed. It would also be nice to know what areas of the net suffer from this communications blockage. I am puzzled as to why this happens. If I were a system manager worried about shortage of resources and able to force my decisions on my users, I would keep net.unix-wizards and net.sources and cut the rest which do not demonstrably contribute to local productivity (though very likely they do in invisible ways by morale boosting, attracting good programmers who will only work where there is access to the net etc.etc.). These two groups dramatically extend the expertise available to my putative local wizards, and this argument applies forcefully, I would have thought, to all installations. Big ones won't see netnews as a big cost relative to other expenses, while small ones really need the free expertise the net makes available. Net.sources is an extension of the ideal behind all the main features of Unix from the earliest days -- decentralization and extensibility. Pipes and the path mechanism are meant to support the idea that programs are added piecemeal to the system, thus pooling software work spread over time and space. This works and is vital locally, and the net effectivly extends this to allow local goups to benefit from a vastly greater pool of creativity. So who is so short sighted as to refuse net.sources? I saw recently that someone, knowing that net.sources was not an effective newsgroup, was going to post a source to net.misc but was dissuaded by Mark Horton from doing so. What are the grounds for refraining? And what alternative is suggested? For instance, if the areas with no net.sources are well-defined are there one or two individuals there, who are prepared to act as forwarding stations? For instance I got two requests from people on the same machine, and I guess that if forwarding big files is a strain on resources, then we should find some way to economise on mailing big messages in duplicate across the continent. Steve Draper UCSD, San Diego ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdcsla!draper draper@nprdc
mark (01/17/83)
1) Roughly what areas of the net do not get net.sources? There is no central database where this is kept track of. Generally, certain fringe areas of "the net" (e.g. USENET) don't get them, and of course the entire part of the world which is not on USENET doesn't get them. (For example, certain newsgroups like unix-wizards are gatewayed onto ARPANET mailing lists - the people on these mailing lists seem to think that mailing lists are wonderful and news is a silly idea; as a consequence they don't get net.sources.) 2) Typically why don't they? Ignoring the non-USENET part of the world, the usual reason is a that a 300 baud phone connection is their sole link to the world, and all their news must come in through that bottleneck. net.sources was specifically made a separate newsgroup so they could shut off the delivery of large things like source files. Other possible reasons include lack of disk space, unreliable connections, and situations where all news is relayed by hand. Finally, there are a few sites that get only a very few newsgroups (e.g. the European sites currently only get something like net.general, net.bugs, and net.news) and typically net.sources is not on this list. It is also possible that a site A may be downstream of another site B that won't forward net.sources. In this case, if A really wants the newsgroup, they probably should look for another site to feed them news. 3) What is the official attitude to the failure of usenet for the second most important newsgroup? Each site gets to pick the newsgroups they want. If a site wanted net.sources, they would get it. If one user on a site wants something and the system administrator has set things up to disallow it, it's between those two, and since the SA pays the bills, chances are the user will be told to request the file via mail. 4) What is the best alternative approved way of distributing sources? net.sources is a good thing to do, if your source is small enough to keep from overflowing half the disks on USENET and you want it to reach lots of people. However, advertising that you have the source (via USENET or a flyer at USENIX or mass mailings or whatever) and having people send you a tape to copy it onto is a more traditional method, and works for bigger programs. Another method is to place the program in a known place on a few well known machines and letting people get it; this requires cooperation from the SA's on those machines and frustrates the half of the net that doesn't have a direct UUCP connection to any of those machines.
bstempleton (01/17/83)
Net.sources is well known for containing huge articles. One can often see a several-thousand line file showing up there. Sites that pay don't want to get such files without an explicit request. That is why they have turned off net.sources. These sites are still interested in programs, probably, so a short announcement makes some sense. Thus they can ask for programs they want explicitly. Right now, there is no policy of how to announce, although most people use a combination of unix-wizards, misc and general to do so. Perhaps we do need a group (which every net.all site would get) called net.sources.announce for intros on each net.sources program. This group might even be fed one way to unix-wizards as a lot of those people are interested. Posting to net.misc was something that a lot of us advised against. After all, when a site has deliberately shut off a group, posting something to another just to get around that is very counterproductive.