From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Fri Nov 19 1999 - 06:03:03 CST
In <Pine.OSF.4.02.9911181155590.32363-100000@worf.netins.net> Jonathan Grobe <grobe@worf.netins.net> writes:
>Where exactly are control.newgroup, control.rmgroup... discussed in this
>draft? The only place I see refers to "used as pseudo newsgroups by many
>serving agents" in the section in the Newsgroups header where newgroups
>names beginning with control are forbidden. It is not clear at all what
>this pseudo newsgroup does and thus why you could ask for an "explicit
>feed of control.newgroup"
Those groups are essentially an invention of INN (for example, CNews just
uses one group 'control' for all of them). So currently it is an
implementation issue, although currently people 'in the know' often take
advantage of the situation by asking for, or offering to supply, feeds of
them (which usually work just fine).
I suppose we could decide to change all that (though I see no particular
reason to do so). I could add some further explanation at the point where
it says "used as pseudo newsgroups by many serving agents".
But too my taste those present INN pseudo-groups are too blunt an
instrument to standardise upon. For example, in my own suck feed, the only
way I can get newgroup messages at all is by asking for
'control.newgroup', but the downside is that I get to see the newgroup
messages for the whole world. But for that very reason, I dare not ask to
receive 'control.cancel' because it would increase my nightly download by
a factor of five :-( . So I have to do without cancels.
The only suggestion for alleviating this problem is to use distributions
as suggested by Brad. Note that the same problem arises with regard to
NOCEMs, which is why it might be sensible to create some regional *.nocem
groups, ad Andrew reported recently in the case of de.*.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Voice/Fax: +44 161 437 4506 Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5