sjb (08/13/82)
Richard Piner's comments on the gateway system into ARPAnet are true in general, but I believe his specific example is wrong. If I am not mistaken, SPACE at MIT-MC (which is what the ARPA people call it, *NOT* fa.space !) IS gatewayed into net.space Matter of fact, it looks to me like fa.space has been stopped (fa.space was just the digest that the ARPA people see as SPACE at MIT-MC) Also, apparently, net.columbia is being gatewayed into SPACE at MC. What this means is that any time you post an article to net.columbia or net.space , everyone on USENET (who gets it) sees it as a regular article; the people on ARPAnet see it as a submission to their digest. When they submit to their digest, they see it as part of their digest and we see it as a regular article with an ARPA mailing address.
mark (08/14/82)
The system is already in chaos, how can it degenerate further? Coming up with a committee of UNIX administrators won't do any good, since (a) the ARPANET is full of LOTS of kinds of machines, many of which are not running UNIX, (b) nobody would be bound by a decision made by the committee, (c) you get n people in a room and you'll get n different opinions on how to do things. The ARPANET has mailing lists, as opposed to newsgroups, and many of them feel that mailing lists are far better than newsgroups because they think mail and news are both called "mail". I disagree with this view, but they have had mailing lists for 10 years and it is clear that they will probably never change. There IS a standard for internet mail addressing which is about to be approved for the ARPA internet, and it's just a question of UUCP following suit to have a uniform, reasonable mailing address syntax. So mail can be made consistent, cleaning up most of the mess. But where news is concerned, you have conflicting goals. If you want a moderator, you can't have the netnews distribution algorithm. If you want everything to be viewed as mail using the current framework, you have to have a high bandwidth network and lots of cycles to waste. You just can't make all the people happy all the time, and since there is no one dictator to tell everyone what to do, the best you can do is let each group do things their way and try to set up a gateway. Mark