CALL FOR DISCUSSION: reorganisation of eunet.general + eunet.followup

[Matthew Farwell]

This is a CALL FOR DISCUSSION of the proposed reorganisation
of eunet.general and eunet.followup.

The proposal is this:

Create a new newsgroup called eunet.misc
Rmgroup eunet.general and eunet.followup.

The reasons for doing so are:

1) It is difficult to follow a discussion that is going on in 2 newsgroups
2) Most of the rest of the world has .misc as opposed to .general
3) Some old news software automatically posts followups from .general to
the corresponding .followup

There might be a case for just eliminating eunet.general, but as stated in
3) some software couldn't cope with this.

Ok. In precisely 3 weeks time (Friday October the 12th), if all goes
well I shall post a CFV. I might even do it sooner if there aren't any
objections.

Discussion, flamage, general chit chat please?

Dylan.
--
Matthew J Farwell | Email: dy...@ibmpcug.co.uk
The IBM PC User Group, PO Box 360,| ...!uunet!ukc!ibmpcug!dylan
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[Matthew Farwell]

In article <39...@alt.dah.sub.org> e...@alt.dah.sub.org (Ed Braaten) writes:

>dy...@ibmpcug.co.uk (Matthew Farwell) writes:
>>3) Some old news software automatically posts followups from .general to
>> the corresponding .followup

>Sounds like a good reason to update the "old" (maybe ancient is more
>appropriate... ;-) news software!

Yeah. I agree. This shouldn't be a problem. But it is.

This is taken from my distribution of rn, Patchlevel 40.
From $rnlib/Pnews.header

case $ng in
*net.general*)
follow=`echo "$ng" | sed 's/net\.general/net.followup/g'`
;;
*)
follow=""
;;
esac

By my reckoning this actually matches eunet.general. Therefore people
with rn of at least patchlevel 40 will have this problem. Admittedly we
are behind the times in having rn at only patchlevel 40 but there
are very good reasons for keeping us at patchlevel 40. Admittedly its only
a very small change to this one shell script, but trying to get every single
news admin in europe to change this is more trouble than its worth.

Conclusion. This problem is not with old/ancient news software but with
some quite recent software which otherwise works perfectly well
and news admins would probably be loath to muck around with.

[Ronald S H Khoo]

In article <39...@alt.dah.sub.org> e...@alt.dah.sub.org (Ed Braaten) writes:

> Sounds like a good reason to update the "old" (maybe ancient is more
> appropriate... ;-) news software!

The Net At Large has discovered that this is IMPOSSIBLE. Henry Spencer
recently mentioned that some sites are still running B 2.6 !! Any solution
other than simply removing .general/.followup and replacing them with .misc
is fraught with difficulties of software hazards.

Aliasing doesn't work anymore, with the large number C news sites now in
existence. I think that's rather a good thing, as the net result from
incomplete aliasing across the net is Yet More Splitting of discussions
across newsgroups.

--
my .signature is on holiday

[Stefan Stapelberg]

In article <1990Sep23....@ibmpcug.co.uk> dy...@ibmpcug.CO.UK (Matthew Farwell) writes:
>This is taken from my distribution of rn, Patchlevel 40.
>From $rnlib/Pnews.header
>
>case $ng in
>*net.general*)
> follow=`echo "$ng" | sed 's/net\.general/net.followup/g'`
> ;;
>*)
> follow=""
> ;;
>esac

This code just generates a Followup-To:-line in your posting if you send an
initial article into 'some_net.general' directly with the Pnews command. If
you post a followup with rn, Pnews.header will not always be executed (this
depends on the installation).

The following code in news2.11/rn/intrp.c (function 'dointerp()') realizes
the 'net.general'-mechanism for rn:

if (htype[FOLLOW_LINE].ht_minpos >= 0)
/* is there a Followup-To line? */
s = follow_buf = fetchlines(art,FOLLOW_LINE);
else {
int off;

s = ngs_buf = fetchlines(art,NGS_LINE);
-> if (h = instr(s,"net.general")) {
-> off = h-s;
-> strncpy(scrbuf,s,off+4);
-> strcpy(scrbuf+off+4,"followup");
-> safecpy(scrbuf+off+12,h+11,sizeof(scrbuf));
-> s = scrbuf;
-> }
}
break;

In my version i have commented out the lines marked above. Maybe this
doesn't conform fully to any net conventions/habits/whatever, but then
the conventions/habits/whatever are out of date. 1/2 :-)

For example, on the german network we have a group dnet.general, but no
corresponding dnet.followup. From time to time there are some users
complaining about this, but until now nothing has changed. It seems
to be easier for the people to change their habits (like editing the
Newsgroups:-line manually) than to change their old software or even
to create a newsgroup. ;-)

Regards, Stefan