daver@hp-pcd.UUCP (daver) (11/04/83)
#N:hp-kirk:7200009:000:938
hp-kirk!daver Nov 2 18:00:00 1983
I'd like to make a request of all users of net.followup. It is
often difficult to determine what submission follows up what
other submission, as the titles don't always match. In addition,
in scanning net.followup (and net.flame) I occasionally come across
a followup to an article of interest but am unable to locate the
article because it is not at all clear from the subject matter
in which notesfile to look. May I propose a new subject heading
for articles in net.followup (and net.flame):
<notesfile>:<start of title of article being referenced>
e.g.
net.general:junk spewing out onto t
and may I propose that the body of each submission mention the
date on which the article being referenced was posted, so people
can reasonable hope to locate the original article.
Thanks,
Dave Rabinowitz
hplabs!hp-pcd!davermark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (11/06/83)
Adding more funny colon lines will not work. We've had a standard for indicating such things for some time (see RFC 850), the References line, but notesfiles does not support it. (In fact, no changes have been made to notesfiles to support the B news format in 2 years.) There is no hope of even getting all notesfiles sites to make such an enhancement, much less any of getting B news sites to start adding funny colon lines, and much less of getting the people who are posting followups using the new article mechanism to use them. News automatically generates the References line. Let's use that. And please use the followup command, not inews or postnews, when you follow something up. That way software can key on References or Subject to group discussions. Mark Horton
essick@uiuccsb.UUCP (11/09/83)
#R:hp-kirk:7200009:uiuccsb:3200018:000:436 uiuccsb!essick Nov 8 20:44:00 1983 Mark, I think you missed Dave's point. The way I understand it is that he wants TITLES in net.flame to reflect their origin using the convention "notesfile: title" as a TITLE. I didn't see anything about making yet another header line. It is true that I haven't done anything with the format of things notesfiles sends to news. But then I've always had problems hitting moving targets. :-> -- Ray Essick, University of Illinois
essick@uiuccsb.UUCP (11/09/83)
#R:hp-kirk:7200009:uiuccsb:3200019:000:1307 uiuccsb!essick Nov 9 01:03:00 1983 I could have been less sarcastic in my previous response. The way notesfiles sends things to news hasn't changed in the last two years for the simple reason of backward compatibility. To recap, the original problems which led to my putting the notesfile header information into the body of the note were (1) b-news didn't pass on unrecognized headers and (2) neither version of news (a and b) liker unique identifiers longer than 14 characters or in formats other than system.integer. B-news has since been modified to pass unrecognized headers. The unique identifier problem is (I gather) almost gone in 2.10. Why don't I convert? Aside from such reasons as "I don't have time" and "I see more important problems" the biggest is that of compatibility. There are still sites running A-news, sites running the old versions of B-news, and the sites running old versions of notesfiles. This makes for a lot of conversion programs between formats. I've left things as they are because they seem to work. I could probably come up with a way to do things that would make news-readers happy, break all the notes-news gateways out there and avoid duplicates, and finally coerce (by way of dissatisfaction) the users of the old notesfile versions to obtain new code. -- Ray Essick, University of Illinois