🚀 go-pugleaf

jml4@cus.cam.ac.uk (John Line) writes:

>> why not:
>>
>>    can.*     (ok)
>>    ab.*   -> can.ab.*
>>    edm.*  -> can.ab.edm.*
>> (etc.)

> The likely problem with this is the maintenance effort for people
> running news servers - you could no longer arrange to receive can.*
> groups knowing that they were all Canada-wide groups and therefore had
> some chance of being of interest to your users

so get fed can.*,!can.*.* -- that works, right?  (I never did get
any opposition to my can.org.* proposal, but neither did I newgroup
it.  the only exception might be can.uucp.maps, alas).

even so, at most you'd have to exclude 11 provinces'/territories'
subhierarchies (assuming you wanted the one for your province).
then, if someone in London doesn't want can.on.tor.*, they can
trim further, if need be.

but probably only once.

>  * if they are sharing namespace hierarchically with e.g. regional groups,
>    there's no way to arrange for you to get national groups without having to
>    do *something* to avoid getting the current (and future) regional groups
>    within the same hierarchy/namespace that you don't want.

but only once, at least in the case of provinces/territories.

> And it doesn't solve the problem with articles cross-posted to local and
> non-local groups, if the local groups clash with groups at sites using
> the same hierarchy name for a different purpose - but using sensible
> names, and *definitely* avoiding single-component names like "general"
> or "local" will go quite a way to avoiding that.

uw.cs.grads probably is legit for all of the uw sites.

> I've seen suggestions that servers should drop from the Newsgroups: line
> any cross-post references to groups that they don't handle

a proposal of mine was to identify `local' vs. `non-local' groups, and
do exactly that -- for _only_ for the `local' groups.  (so that a post
from UWaterloo to comp.misc,uw.cs.grads would leave UWat sites with
_only_ comp.misc, but travel unmolested within UWat)

another possibility would be to have can.* be national, except for
can.prov.<prov-abbreviation>.*, which would be provincial, except
for can.prov.<prov-abbreviation>.{city? town? muni?}.*, which would
be for a municipality.

but that's inelegant, and I probably don't like it.  going from
edm.general to can.prov.ab.muni.edm.general is too much of an
extension for me.
-- 
Russell Schulz  russell@alpha3.ersys.edmonton.ab.ca  ersys!rschulz  Shad 86c