🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <C1Kq41.3LM.2@cs.cmu.edu> Karl_Kleinpaste@cs.cmu.edu writes:
>jmalcolm@sura.net writes:
>   the person who originally gatewayed the gnu.* groups said that
>   the gnu distribution was indeed deliberate.
>
>That was possibly me, but more likely Bob Sutterfield.

I think it was Bob Sutterfield.

>The reason it's there is that the gateway software in use at the time
>was Erik Fair's newsgate code, which was largely a couple of
>horrendous awk(1) scripts along with some m4(1) incantations to create
>the /usr/lib/aliases and sys file entries.  The specific problem (as I
>recall; memory is fuzzy by now) was that the m4 macros required a
>distribution (for Erik's purposes, this was usually "inet") and we
>couldn't think of anything more appropriate.  I distinctly recall
>trying to use "world," only to find that some piece of the news
>software tossed its cookies as a result.  "gnu" may have just been a
>compromise to make the beastie work at all, and under B News, that was
>OK.

OK. This wasn't what Bob Sutterfield said, as best I recall, the last
time this came up. But this does seem to indicate that there is no
particular reason that there *needs* to be a gnu distribution.

>   We'd actually like to get out of the gatewaying business altogether
>   (we do more than gnu.*); it's one more complexity for our shrinking
>   staff to cope with.
>
>OSU Computer Science system support staff: 6 years and 17 hirings
>later, the software staff still consists of about 3 people...

Fairly high attrition rate there, eh?

-- 
Joseph Malcolm				jmalcolm@sura.net		
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