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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!floyd!harpo!ihnp4!pegasus!avi
From: avi@pegasus.UUCP (Avi E. Gross)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Suggestion for *MAJOR* topic reorganization
Message-ID: <1022@pegasus.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 1-Mar-84 16:54:00 EST
Article-I.D.: pegasus.1022
Posted: Thu Mar  1 16:54:00 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 3-Mar-84 07:29:14 EST
References: <696@nsc.UUCP> <2613@alice.UUCP> <708@nsc.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Information Systems, Lincroft NJ
Lines: 40

I hear all these suggestions for making top-level groups like sci(ence) and
cs and ent and .... I agree that many other topologies would lead to an
easier, and more consistent, way of doing things.

I would like to bring up the age old taboo again. Why don't we just totally
get rid of the "net" uppermost domain? It has absolutely no reason for
existence, now that the "distribution"  feature is available. Rather than
having something strange like "net.comp.cs.crypt", we can shorten it by
four characters. On my machine (in the att.subdomain), I have newsgroups
like att.general and ho.general and nj.general and abi.general and oms.general
and just plain general. These are all taking up room in the active file and
all have their own subdirectories. In other words, we have SEVEN general
groups.

I would like to propose that we consider making the upheaval a bit more
dramatic. Change all groups to be controlled by the Distribution field.
Then, fix postnews/inews so that the default distribution is always local,
unless the user specifies usa, or na, or net or nj or .... This way, you
have to think about where things go at all times. When a followup is done,
it too should prompt you for a distribution, and recommend that the
distribution be no larger than the original note. The software could just
strip any prefixes like "net" off the front of any newsgroup names, for a
while.

There are some problems with this. A method must be available to allow you
to send to a Union or Intersection of domains. For example, I may want to
send something to nj AND att. An additional problem is how a user can
specify (on a per-group basis) what they want to receive. If they want just
(att.something and nj.something) and not (na.something and na.something),
how could you specify that in your .newsrc? I would suggest that your
.newsrc would by default have a format of:
	"news.group[:!] {article numbers} [:!] {distributions}"

Where the default distribution is "all" and can be left out. The [:!] would
have the usual meaning of turning the group (or distribution list) on or off.
Please pass any comments directly to news.group.

-- 
-=> Avi E. Gross @ AT&T Information Systems Laboratories (201) 576-6241
 suggested paths: [ihnp4, allegra, cbosg, hogpc, ...]!pegasus!avi