From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 07 2002 - 14:23:44 CDT
Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
> But to change the whole concept of newsgroup naming from the present
> hierarchical system as this stage of the game is simply not on. The
> present system works well enough, is widely (though not universally)
> understood, and is even helpful for many purposes.
I'd rather try large and difficult changes that are entirely optional and
*really* backward-compatible that can be adopted if they actually provide
sufficient usefulness to the users than try to pile hack on top of
incompatible hack to preserve "backward compatibility" that actually
isn't.
The code to implement pretty names on the server side is dead simple. The
only hard part is the control messages, and even that part isn't too bad.
Existing programs like actsync could be expanded to synchronize lists of
pretty names if hierarchies wanted to do that.
One of the interesting questions there would be whether we could design in
global aliases from the very beginning, and whether that would be useful
in this context. It's certainly a glaring lack with traditional newsgroup
naming.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>