From: Clive D.W. Feather (clive@demon.net)
Date: Mon Oct 14 2002 - 06:10:08 CDT
Erland Sommarskog said:
> Why must there be a one-to-one mapping between "prettyname" and "address"?
> Because else people cannot talk to each other. Some might say: "You can
> read about that in the group 'Politik, svensk och utländsk'", the thing
> in single quotes being prettyname on his server for the group swnet.politik.
> But another user might not find this group, because on his server the
> prettyname is "Bitching about taxes" (A common description in the Newsgroups
> file for swnet.politik). And a third user only sees the name swnet.politik
> because his client or server does not support prettynames. Or the server
> does not have the prettyname for swnet.politik for whatever reason. And
> a fourth user ends up in se.politik.diverse, because on that server
> 'Politik, svensk och utländsk' maps to that group.
>
> Greg has been handwaving and pointing to AOL, but there is a huge difference
> between one single site and zillion of newsservers, whereof the most
> are administrated left-handedly if at all.
This expresses the point I am trying to make.
No, I can't point to particular flame-wars on Google because I can't come
up with a simple search string. But anyone who's watched a "Fred is reading
this in alt.weeble and Sheila is reading it in alt.womble" cross-flame will
be familiar with the concept.
> To go back to Russ's question, we have, say, 50000 groups out there.
> How do we assign global prettynames to all these? For Big-8, Russ, Tale
> and some more people can take a weekend or two to go through the list,
> and same is true for well-maintained national hierarchies like uk.*
As one of those responsible for maintaining uk.*, I dread to even think of
what would be involved in getting this done. Charles will know what I mean.
-- Clive D.W. Feather | Work: <clive@demon.net> | Tel: +44 20 8371 1138 Internet Expert | Home: <clive@davros.org> | Fax: +44 870 051 9937 Demon Internet | WWW: http://www.davros.org | Mobile: +44 7973 377646 Thus plc | |