From: Bill Davidsen (davidsen@prodigy.com)
Date: Mon Aug 05 2002 - 16:04:14 CDT
On Mon, 5 Aug 2002, David Iain Greig wrote:
> Talk.origins uses a C program written originally for (I recall) soc.
> singles.california. It cannot handle encapsulation of posts.
>
> I find Bill's position laudable in theory, and execrable in practice.
> There are myriads or moderated newsgroups; to think there is a single
> tool that will work for all of them is madness.
Could you give us the names of some of the myriad of groups using
non-ASCII names in moderated groups? They must not make it to my site.
And if there are already tools to handle this why is it being fought so
hard?
Or are you missing the point that there doesn't seem to be any such
software and I am suggesting that there should be one. In place. Working.
That old proof of concept? It takes only one to kill the argument that
there are no tools, but clearly that's what some people are trying to
prevent.
Obviously the people who oppose any steps which allow handling of
extended character sets oppose having a tools which allows moderation of
such groups as well.
I predict that these folks screaming that all of usenet will break if we
allow anything but good old ASCII will find themselves fighting some
ill-considered scheme which partially solves the problem, because people
are tired of waiting.
People who refuse to learn from yEnc are doomed to repeast it. I give up.
To my pleasant surprise one of the lurkers in this list has suggested a
group of people who would be delighted to have a portable tool, which
will be as fun to write and a hell of a lot less irritation.
> As far as I can see from the discussion here, USEFOR has not evidenced
> any concern for the problems moderators will face. Exactly why should
> we, in turn, evidence interest in their ideas?
>
> I appreciate the problems of local character sets; I also appreciate
> that everyone seems to agree that email is where a real solution
> needs to come from; what I do NOT appreciate is the decision to risk
> seriously breaking Usenet because we can't fix email as easily.
>
> Ad-hoc solutions for long-term problems suck. Encapsulation, as
> propounded (poorly) by it's proponents on the moderators
> discussion list, *screams* 'ad hoc'.
Ad-hoc is what you will get after the nay-sayers delay this too long and
someone pops out a solution with one hour of thought, two hours of
coding, and no review at all. And we will have to live with it.
Encapsulation is clean, it requires that nothing in the way of smarts
between the origin and the point at which the article is extracted
intact. Which need not be done in the mail program at all, as long as
something in the system knows how to save an articicle in a mail folder.
-- -bill davidsen (davidsen@darkstar.prodigy.com) "The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the last possible moment - but no longer" -me