From: greg andruk (gja@meowing.net)
Date: Tue Oct 08 2002 - 16:56:54 CDT
Russ Allbery wrote:
> Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
>>Control: newgroup news.groups; prettyname="New Newsgroup Proposals"
> That's a good solution for fantasyland, but we still need a good solution
> for the real world.
Right, adding parameters to the Control header like that would break,
oh, just about every deployed server.
> The checkgroups equivalent is the easy part. newgroup has some
> significant problems already given the way that the newsgroup description
> is presented in the control message. I'm tempted to think that we need a
> new control message for newgroup as well, so that we can fix various
> problems like that.
I believe that Brad's "kludge extra header" is the pragmatic thing to
do. It preserves backward compatibility and lets us do the new things
in a sane way. We can always leave in the "For your newsgroups file:"
wart for legacy reasons, it doesn't really get in the way.
checkgroups is definitely another story, it really does need to be done
over from scratch to allow additional group attributes to be listed.
The (Moderated) suffix thingy is cute, but there are limits to how cute
one wants to get.
On multiple display names: yes, these are easy to support. There is the
potential for turf wars in alt.*, but _everything_ is a potential turf
war there. In administered hierarchies, someone is already keeping tabs
on silliness.
And yes, it's okay for groups in different administrative domains to
give their groups overlapping display names, just like it's okay for a
mail server to have multiple users named John Smith. Once again, with
feeling: names are not addresses, and these are solved problems.
On putting groups into one or more administrative or logical
collections: this is actually quite easy to do, in a way that reflects
existing practice by default. It would be nicer with cryptothingies,
but would work as well as anything works on Usenet without having them
in place.
In another message:
[Charles]
>> I agree that this is a matter for future experimentation possibly
>> followed by standardization. But I would not like it to be used
>> as an excuse for doing nothing about I18N group names now.
[Brad]
> While I have not followed it in detail, I have not seen much signs of
> resolution on those issues, so I think that is exactly what we need.
I certainly wouldn't want to see these name extensions pushed off into
the distant future, indeed I believe that the specification can be
somewhat simpler than might be gleaned from reading this thread. What
we do need is to get the unworkable Newsgroups: charset expansion
proposal out of the way so that something productive can be achieved.