Re: #1047 Path field delimiters and syntax - status

[Richard Clayton <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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In message <200508211145.38612@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Bruce Lilly
<blilly@xxxxxxxxx> writes

>> All of which is why we removed <comment>s from the Path quite some time ago.
>
>"we" didn't remove them.  It was a one-person, non-consensus, unilateral
>action based on flawed reasoning.

About a year ago I parsed about four months worth of articles from a
fairly complete feed (not the labelled binary groups, but I'd doubt that
made any difference since I don't think they form a disjoint set of
servers) ...  There were about 27,400,000 articles in the set.

By splitting at "!" characters I identified 11,063 "servers" (ie:
fragments of Path: header fields which lie to the left of an indication
of injection (such as "not-for-mail", but in fact there's a few dozen
others of interest that you need to handle).

I identified ZERO comments at that time -- and looking at the list of
servers now, none seem to be anything other than machine identities

So I'm not sure they were there to be removed, or that, for interop
reasons, adding them would be in the least bit wise :-(

- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

BTW: Usenet is not all that big -- I identified 2556 servers as being
part of a "peering core" (from my vantage point). The other 8500
machines were merely feeding into that core.

The algorithm was to start from 'news.maxwell.syr.edu' and see if any
article arrived that had been given any articles by this machine. If so
then they were added to the core and a check made to see if there were
now other machines to which articles had been given...  iterate.

Looking now at those 2556 servers -- which are, at least from my vantage
point, somewhat more important than the rest -- I find that 218 of them
have chosen to use an identity that is a bare word, and I'd say that
half of those look to be UUCP names.

- -- 
richard @ highwayman . com                       "Nothing seems the same
                          Still you never see the change from day to day
                                And no-one notices the customs slip away"

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