furuta (01/11/83)
net.emacs is a gatewayed Arpanet list, Unix.Emacs@CMUA, which discusses Gosling's Emacs. Gosling's maintains the Arpanet list and has been using it to announce new versions, bug fixes, etc. (where etc. also includes software like his spreadsheet calculator, sc). Creation of the group probably wasn't discussed here in Usenet before being created because it's making information currently available on the Arpanet also available to those Unix sites which are on Usenet but not the Arpanet. If Usenet doesn't want to hear this information, I'm sure that the gateway could be convinced to turn it off. Since the Arpanet list was serving a fairly specialized purpose, disseminating information about Gosling's Emacs, it will obviously become necessary and desirable to subdivide net.emacs if the Usenet conversations start wandering too far afield. There seem to be a thousand and one different Unix Emacs. Discussions involving the internals of one particular one will not be of interest to those who run the others. Perhaps net news 2.10 will allow this subdivision. Does it matter? I'm sure, however, that there will be lots of people who will be limited to 14 character news groups names for some time. I happen to think that net.emacs is not that bad of a name for this group. I don't object violently to its existance. The main purpose of this note is to prevent another net.trivia-like renaming fiasco from taking place. Any damage which has been done by creating this group is much less than the damage which will be done by moving it around. In a year, it may even seem logical. --Rick ...decvax!microsoft!uw-beaver!uw-june!furuta (uucp) ...ucbvax!lbl-csam!uw-beaver!uw-june!furuta or Furuta@Washington (ARPAnet)
warren (01/11/83)
Being a recipient of all of the emacs mailing lists, I doubt that the volume in net.emacs would swamp anybody. It is interesting information to see what is available in other implementations anyway, even if your emacs isn't the one being disucssed. I don't really see it necessary to create lots of subgroups yet. I could make 2 suggestions to those submitting things. 1) Identify which implementation you are talking about in each message. (Gosling's, Zimmerman's, Montgomery's(BTL), ITS/TWENEX) 2) When mailing lists are gatewayed, and this applies to other gatewayed mailing lists as well, strip the irrelevant junk out of the headers. Gosling's mailing list comes with a full page of headers containing the entire list and all of the sites it visited along the way. Warren Montgomery ihnss!warren