From: Brad Templeton (brad@templetons.com)
Date: Mon Apr 30 2001 - 12:59:06 CDT
On Mon, Apr 30, 2001 at 09:24:04AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> That's separate from the idea of removing Xref headers when you feed a
> news server outside your local domain... but how do you define domain?
> There are some servers at Stanford that slave and some that don't.
> They're all in .stanford.edu. I think this is completely the wrong metric
> to try to use.
Perhaps best not to call the site name in a local header the "domain"
then. Perhaps better to think of it as a distribution.
The right way to treat it is to say, "am I a member of that distribution?
If so, I should use that header, for example to sync article numbers.
If I am not I should ignore and strip it coming in, and to be nice if I
know I'm sending it to somebody who isn't, I should strip it going out."
>
> Brad is describing a news-based publishing system where the articles that
> are made available to the public are different than the articles that
> people work with internally. I don't see why there's any advantage, in
> that specialized of a case, for using some generalized local header
> concept (which may not even fit; what if there are several internal
> domains that all want to see the full article?) rather than doing
> precisely what they did, namely put a "prepare for public consumption"
> step in the process of feeding the messages off-site.
Actually, I think a lot of the stuff that people want injectors to put
into the worldwide distributed article makes more sense being stored
only on the local server. Only a small part of the audit trail should go
to the outside world, just enough to spot spam. The rest is local business.
Now it can also be put in a local log file, but many have pointed out the
convenience of binding it with the article.
The point is, if you come up with a concept, it is bad design to special
case it. You should generalize it, so that other future headers can
use the concept with no new code, or indeed even handle it partly in
old software.
Just because you can't think up another local header besides the ones
I have cited is no argument that one won't exist.