From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Sep 21 1999 - 09:09:57 CDT
In <19990920135100.55728@main.templetons.com> Brad Templeton <brad@main.templetons.com> writes:
>On Mon, Sep 20, 1999 at 02:40:05PM +0000, Dirk Nimmich wrote:
>> Maurizio Codogno wrote:
>> > Nowadays, Distribution: is completely useless. Were it for me, I'd delete
>> > it, since it won't be used anyway.
>> > I find "Distribution: local" extremly useful for testing purposes.
>A new semantic was proposed for Distribution which is similar to the
>original but fixes the problems.
>The concept was to supplant the use of distribution in the control of
>outgoing feeds with using it to control incoming feeds. (Outgoing feed
>control can still remain but it will always be unreliable over multi hops.)
Sure, but if you read our draft, that feature is already included.
What we have specified is
1. That sending agents be configurable to prevent sending the wrong stuff
(in practice, this may only be used to prevent local stuff leaking from a
site, though this may involve more than the single case of "local"). This
is what INN and CNews have always provided.
2. That receiving agents should be configurable to prevent reception of
unwanted stuff. This could be useful for sites which know exactly what
they want (but not for general ISPs). Again, INN provides this already, and
CNews used to, and could easily be made to do so again.
3. What is new is the possibility for reading agents to be configurable to
reject unwanted stuff (with or without the help of the overview). But this
is only a "MAY" and, in fact, user agents that allow the killfile to operate
on the Distribution header could be said to offer this service already.
Granted, it will take time for decent implementations of this to be widely
available.
Note that conventional geographic distributions are well out of fashion,
although if what is suggested is widely implemented they may come back
into use again, but controlled mostly from the receiving end. A much more
likely use in the future is for issuers of NOCEMS and Cancels to identify
themselves, so that site can easily choose which ones to listen to. And
also for NOCEMS and cancels to contain an indication of the hierarchies
they affect, so they can be filterd out by sites that do not take those
hierarchies (at the moment, there is no way that a site of modest size can
seriously contemplate subscribing to the whole of news.lists.filters).
-- 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