🚀 go-pugleaf

In news.admin.misc, article <1jsai5INN18f@slab.mtholyoke.edu>,
  jbotz@mtholyoke.edu (Jurgen Botz) writes:
> A very large percentage of the articles in the gnu.* hierarchy arrive
> on my system with distribution "gnu".  I think it might be the case
> that the mail->news gateway softare used generates this distribution
> header.  My feeling is that it shouldn't do that... I don't see any
> reason why "gnu" should be a valid distribution at all, and even if
> someone saw a need for such a distribution it certainly shouldn't be
> used on articles posted only to groups in the gnu.* hierarchy... the
> only thing it accomplishes there is to waste 18 bytes and continue to
> confuse the distribution header issue.
> 
We have the same problem in Germany, with the de.* hierarchy (German-language
newsgroups; don't ask me for a feed, as most well-connected US sites either
already have it or get a feed from somebody who does).

Nobody has yet come up with a sensible reason why a special distribution
for de.* would be necessary or even what semantics it should have.

Besides, since the header isn't necessary, many sites forget to add the
fake "de" distribution to their sys files, causing propagation holes for
articles that have this header.

> Since someone is now attempting to maintain a list of valid
> distributions, and since INN does a lot to help the cause of trying to
> make distributions useful again, I think that now would be a good time
> to settle this issue and fix the gateway software to not generate
> these useless distribution headers.

Many readers automatically insert a "Distribution: XXX" header when you
post to any newsgroup XXX.yyy.zzz, and special-case the hiarchies which
should not get that treatment (the "big seven").

IMHO, this is just plain wrong. It muddles the distinction between Newsgroups
and Distributions and forces me to add a lot of gunk to my sys / newsfeed
files if I don't want to drop these articles.

-- 
If you are in a car travelling at the speed of light in reverse and
        turn on the headlights, what happens?
-- 
Matthias Urlichs  --  urlichs@smurf.sub.org -- urlichs@smurf.ira.uka.de   /(o\
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