From: Brad Templeton (brad@main.templetons.com)
Date: Mon Sep 20 1999 - 16:32:06 CDT
On Mon, Sep 20, 1999 at 02:10:03PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Brad Templeton <brad@main.templetons.com> writes:
>
> > A news database or transport instead maintains a list of the
> > distributions which it considers itself to be a "member" of.
>
> This is the way that INN has dealt with Distribution for years and years
> now. It still hasn't made the traditional semantics of Distribution as
Sort of. While the ME line is available it is not that well used. Indeed,
it was first C News and then INN which ruined the distribution line by
allowing lazy admins to code feed distributions as "all,!this,!that" which
assures that one leak anywhere propagates to the whole net.
The answer is to just make it clear that you can't depend on others to
do your distribution filtering for you, though they can help. In addition,
it means newsreaders should start doing it.
That way I can post a message with distribution of "ba" (bay area) and
if people who are not in the BA see it, it is their newsreader to blame or
their site -- something they have control over -- and not some admin who
leaked "ba" out to France either accidentally or deliberately.
> representing a geographic area more useful; the fatal flaw in that system
> lies with the fact that news servers often cannot be usefully linked to a
> particular set of geographic areas and geographic distributions are almost
> never used in any sensible fashion. I'm not going to reject messages
> claiming to be limited in distribution to France when I have French users
> who want to read them.
Correct. Users know what distributions they want to read, and sites sometimes
know. For users at global ISPs the answer is to have the newsreader maintain
a list of distributions (possibly defaulting to something it fetches from
the news server to avoid user config), or to have the localized site do it
on behalf of those with older readers.
>
> It's not useful for me to have to continually add more new distributions
> as the crop up so that my users can continue to receive all Usenet
> articles in the groups that they read. My server is therefore configured
You would not have to. The default for a hub or ISP would be to receive all
distributions, as is common practice now.
Instead, you would start being able to reliably exclude distributions you don't
want if you are a site, or pick ones you do want if you are a user.
> to receive all distributions, despite the fact that the code fully
> supports your proposed semantics already. From discussing this with other
It does not.