Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site bambi.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!gamma!pyuxww!pyuxa!bambi!mike
From: m...@bambi.UUCP (Michael Caplinger)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: elementary posting rules
Message-ID: <202@bambi.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 4-Nov-85 18:43:38 EST
Article-I.D.: bambi.202
Posted: Mon Nov 4 18:43:38 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 5-Nov-85 09:44:59 EST
Organization: Bell Communications Research
Lines: 19
Why aren't the following three rules enforced?
1) No automatic cross-posting (responses to the "first" or "best" of the
original's groups by default).
2) No automatic quoting of messages. If people want to quote, make them
work hard to do it. Maybe they'll find it easier to paraphrase.
3) No messages with less than X lines of content, for X on the order of
10. Content is NOT quotes or signatures. Maybe that would stop the
stupid "me too" message from being sent.
It seems a simple matter to add (or in case 2, subtract) the needed
functionality from the user software. Wouldn't this help reduce useless
traffic?
Michael Caplinger
m...@bellcore.arpa
ihnp4!bambi!mike
Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site decuac.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!decuac!avolio
From: avo...@decuac.UUCP (Frederick M. Avolio)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: elementary posting rules
Message-ID: <677@decuac.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 6-Nov-85 12:30:29 EST
Article-I.D.: decuac.677
Posted: Wed Nov 6 12:30:29 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 7-Nov-85 05:57:56 EST
References: <202@bambi.UUCP>
Organization: ULTRIX Applications Center, MD
Lines: 14
In article <2...@bambi.UUCP>, m...@bambi.UUCP (Michael Caplinger) writes:
> It seems a simple matter to add (or in case 2, subtract) the needed
> functionality from the user software. Wouldn't this help reduce useless
> traffic?
Mike, take a look sometime at the list posted from Seismo of
"Known Versions of News" in existance. People are running versions of
news that are 3 years old and 3 versions old. (For example, by the
header I see that site bambi runs news 2.10.1 created on 6/24/83.
2.10.2 has been around for over a year now.) Software changes for
enforcement of rules will never work since there is no way to make
people install them. (People don't, even when there are free and
better versions available!)
Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site utcs.uucp
Path: utzoo!utcs!geoff
From: ge...@utcs.uucp (Geoff Collyer)
Newsgroups: net.news.group,net.news
Subject: why people don't upgrade to the newest and bluest B news
Message-ID: <955@utcs.uucp>
Date: Fri, 8-Nov-85 03:14:23 EST
Article-I.D.: utcs.955
Posted: Fri Nov 8 03:14:23 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 8-Nov-85 04:37:29 EST
References: <202@bambi.UUCP> <677@decuac.UUCP>
Reply-To: ge...@utcs.uucp (Geoff Collyer)
Organization: University of Toronto - General Purpose UNIX
Lines: 55
Summary: cuz the damn stuff doesn't include posted bug fixes
In article <6...@decuac.UUCP> avo...@decuac.UUCP (Frederick M. Avolio) writes:
> People are running versions of
>news that are 3 years old and 3 versions old. (For example, by the
>header I see that site bambi runs news 2.10.1 created on 6/24/83.
>2.10.2 has been around for over a year now.) Software changes for
>enforcement of rules will never work since there is no way to make
>people install them. (People don't, even when there are free and
>better versions available!)
Sorry for the long inclusion, but these complaints are often heard from
news gurus. Erik Fair recently said similar things.
utcs and utcsstat are still running 2.10.1 and are likely to either
keep running it, run Australian 2.10.1 news (by Michael Rourke) or run
our own. [ We already run rn and Henry Spencer's expire, which doesn't
have all the bells and gongs of the standard expire but runs *much*
faster (it keeps the expiry time in the history file so it never has to
open, stat or even access a file to determine whether to expire it or
not) and regenerates the dbm history data base each time it runs. If
Henry or I gets around to rewriting inews (or modifying Australian
inews) so that it does its own unbatching without forking nor execing,
I'd be glad to chuck B news into the trash. ]
Let me tell you why I don't plan to upgrade our machines. I would be
much more interested in running new versions of B news if I didn't have
to regression test all the new sources against my sources to ensure
that fixes that were posted to Usenet and mailed to the maintainers
were *actually* incorporated into the latest version. We started out
running 2.3 and upgraded pretty religously until 2.10.1. Around 2.8 or
2.9 I found a number of bugs, mailed & posted them and they weren't
fixed in 2.10, so I mailed them to Mark Horton again and they weren't
fixed in 2.10.1 (the ones that spring to mind are a bunch of unchecked
fopens that can fail if your machine doesn't have a /usr/tmp, for
example). Given that the news sources are big, I have no interest in
regression testing new releases, and there really haven't been major
improvements in news since 2.10.1 to act as a carrot.
I keep hearing that 2.10.2 and the as-yet-unavailable 2.10.3 are vastly
better written than previous versions of B news, but I don't have the
energy to diff my current (much debugged) sources with new ones to
verify that my fixes really got in. If a sufficiently large carrot (in
the form of some vast new improvement) appears in a new news version, I
might gather up the energy to diff versions, but if my fixes are
*still* not in the new version I look at, I doubt very much that I'll
ever do it again. Australian news is attractive because it is much
better written that B news 2.10.1, changes infrequently (I know of only
two versions: 1.0 and 1.1) and its source code is about 1/7th the size
of the B news sources, so there is far less code to diff or fix.
Incidentally, utzoo (a backbone site) is still running B news 2.10,
except for Henry's completely new expire, even though backbones are
supposed to run the latest and greatest B news code. I can fully
understand why Henry hasn't upgraded.
--
B news is Bad news.
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