🚀 go-pugleaf

bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) writes:

>   This is wrong.  There is no "gnu" distribution.  

>Huh?  When I created it on May 2, 1988, the gnu.* heirarchy was only
>carried between sites that agreed to exchange the "gnu" distribution.
>If you don't have ",gnu," in your news sys file and you're getting the
>articles anyway, complain to the netnews administrator of the site
>that's feeding them to you.  The "Distribution: gnu" header line
>should restrict GNU-related articles to only those machines that have
>agreed to carry them.

   No. Distributions are not the same as hierarchies. They used to be
*treated* the same, but even that time is past. The gnu.* hierarchy is
only carried between sites that agree to exchange the "gnu" *hierarchy*.
True, they should also accept the "gnu" distribution since most articles
in here are marked with "Distribution: gnu".

   C news was designed to mark the difference between hierarchies and
distributions, and you could always do it with B news if you cared to put
forth the effort. The names of hierarchies and distributions need not be
related. The fact that there are both a gnu.* hierarchy and a "gnu"
distribution is, aside from historical trivia, no more than coincedence.
And the "gnu" distribution is useless since it's only found on articles
posted to some group in the gnu.* hierarchy.

>   If you post using Gnus, email me for a simple patch that fixes
>   this.

>What could you do to GNUS to fix what isn't broken?

   No, it *is* broken. It is! It is! It is!

   While I accept that there is such a distribution as "gnu" (even if it's
totally redundant), there isn't a distribution "comp" or "misc", etc. That
gnus, like so many other readers broken in this respect, puts these in by
default is *wrong*. I accept these bogus distributions, but only as an
acknowlegement of how much broken software is out there. Many sites don't
accept such nonexistant distributions. There are probably even some who
take the gnu.* hierarchy but don't accept the "gnu" distribution.

"If it ain't perfect, don't leave it."
--
James Gritton - gritton@byu.edu - I disclaim