werner@rascal.ics.utexas.edu (Werner Uhrig) (11/20/90)
the question comes up with nice regularity: How do I share this nifty public domain file with the world? you are probably aware of the existence of the newsgroup "comp.binaries.mac" and "comp.sources.mac" and the fact that it is a "moderated group" meaning that your news-software should know about it and to flag the group as "moderated" (as well as how to reach the moderator by email; it gets this information from regularly distributed 'control messages' which your news-administrator, if anyone, should worry about - not you, the user). What does this mean for the user who wants to submit some public domain program (or data) for distribution as a CBM-article? Well, ideally, he shouldn't have to worry about it one way or the other, but should simply post the (compressed and binhexed) file(s) to newsgroup comp.binaries.mac as if to any other newsgroup - with the difference that the news-software should kick in, realize that it is dealing with a moderated newsgroup, and send the file to the moderator as in an email message instead (btw, downstream sites (to which your machine would pass such an article, if your news-software is not set up right to intercept and email such an article) should intercept such "illegal articles" and send them to the moderator instead .. (comp.sys.mac.announce is also such a group, and sometimes I am nearly inundated with email from machine in far-flung corners of the world, where this set-up has not quite been perfected yet - normally, moderators react with "squeals of protest" to the administrators of the guilty machines and, sometimes, the innocent ones in their neighborhood - which is the only way of convincing people there to raise the priotity flag to get such things fixed "or get off USEnet"...;-) Now, ideally, our CBM-moderator would have set up his email-software to recognize incoming articles and automagically send an acknow- ledgement back to the sender. Well, he doesn't have the right magic installed (yet), unfortunately, and besides, it is only sometimes possible to determine a valid return-address to the sender of a message. Well, the moderator could send an acknowledge- ment manually, when he processes the file (when he does his voodoo to verify that the file arrived intact, that the stuffing and binhexing can be reversed, that the file does not contain any viruses, or - banish-the-thought - that the submitted file contains stuff which is not in the public domain...), but, alas, he doesn't (yet?), though many have asked him to do so in the past (yours truely included). But when you look at what he needs to do already, you may find sympathy in your heart for he has every reason to want to reduce the amount of tasks he needs to perform (so, if you feel you must gripe, please do it with a friendly and understanding smile, at least .... :-) Another item some people get unhappy about is that after submitting a file to the moderator and they don't see it distributed on CBM for a long time, they are left in the dark, not knowing, did the file reach the moderator? is it in his queue for distribution, being preempted, possibly, by "more important" files? (I'm sure we all can agree that anti-virals and Apple Tech Notes and such should have priority in distribution over some game, sound or picture file.... one thing you should know in that regard is that our CBM-moderator, in voluntary and informal cooperation with the moderators of other high-volume groups, is limiting the volume he will post daily to CBM to some number of kilobytes - I forget what it is exactly, something between 100k and 200k daily, I believe) and that he has automated that process to a degree now where he often has a queue of articles to distribute which reaches many weeks into the future ...... yes, I have asked him to routinely post an article with an index of the files/articles in the queue, but whereas he has sent me an occasional such index, we have not gotten to the "point of happiness all around" in this matter... (yet?!?)... ;-) Now, many (most?) of you are on machines with the ability to either FTP or access file-servers by email, and might wonder what the connection is between CBM and the archives: well, no formal one, really, but the archive-maintainers might scan CBM and cull off articles and archive them; or they submitters may send them to both CBM and archive-maintainers separately; or one might forward to the other ... anyway, it's all volunteer work and whereas it may be true that some people might actually be doing archive-maintenance as part of their job, noone has gotten ambiteous enough to really create a "system" of cooperation between moderator(s) and archive-maintainer(s) that is worth the name (though, again, suggestions for such have been made in private email-forums, but there are only 'so many' (unpaid) man-hours available to do the work - not to speak of available disk-space, bandwith and cycles for file-server software, etc ...) But let me get to the point of all this and annouce, publically, the existence of a little known service that I have been performing for years now, mainly that if you send files you want to see archived and distributed on CBM to the address macgifts@rascal.ics.utexas.edu or if your mailer requires a UUCP-style address: ...!uunet!rascal.ics.utexas.edu!macgifts (where ...! means a valid path from your site to UUNET - but you could also choose a different gateway machine such as BERKELEY, HARVARD, GATECH, ....there are too many to name them all...) ...the file will be forwarded (by me or a helper) to archive sites such as SUMEX, SIMTEL-20, ETHZ, others (which will also make them available by BITnet and other file-servers and shadow-archives) as well as to the CBM-moderator. I do, usually, archive all such files (as well as CBM-articles, in general) in RASCAL's FTPable directories (at least for a limited time, determined by available space on my file-system), but I do no "sanity-checking" (for viruses or transmission- or other errors which might make the files unusable) though, I believe, the archive maintainers at SUMEX and SIMTEL-20 do such checking routinely before making the files available to the public in FTPable directories there. Also, if incoming mail arrives on RASCAL with a RFC-conforming header Return-Receipt-To: valid reply-address, preferably domain-style then my mailer will send you an ACK without me having to remember to do that (I often do manually anyway) I request that you indicate at the beginning of the message how widely you would like to see the file distributed (if you have sent it to CBM or other archives yourself already, please tell me so) as it avoids unnecessary duplication of efforts. Comments? Cheers, ---Werner -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- Internet: werner@rascal.ics.utexas.edu werner@astro.as.utexas.edu werner@cs.utexas.edu BITnet: werner@UTXVM UUCP: ...!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!werner OR ...!utastro!werner -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- -+- "This is VERY simple: FIRST, you access your mainframe.... 8-| ...or 'ON' to the computer illiterate..." (said the The Wizard to Shoe on Nov 13, 90)