Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/17/84; site opus.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!hao!cires!nbires!opus!rcd From: rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn) Newsgroups: net.news Subject: Re: Overhelpfulness in 2.10.2 Message-ID: <906@opus.UUCP> Date: Tue, 16-Oct-84 14:21:46 EDT Article-I.D.: opus.906 Posted: Tue Oct 16 14:21:46 1984 Date-Received: Thu, 18-Oct-84 06:49:36 EDT References: <890@opus.UUCP> <140@geowhiz.UUCP> Distribution: net Organization: NBI,Inc, Boulder CO Lines: 44 > > A second over-helpfulness is sucking in the entire base article prefixed > > with "> " for a followup. > > I vote that this feature be retained. It helps keep replies in > context. I think that users should be aware that they don't have > to keep the entire "> " prefixed article in their follow ups. I think that, in an ideal world, picking up the article with "> " is a good idea. My concern is that things are not "all for the best in this the best of all possible worlds" and that it's going to give us much longer articles. (Without the base article cited in the followup, there's still the "References:" line which lets you go back to the parent article. Different people need different amounts of context.) Also, I didn't realize that the convention which makes the article's pathname available (in the shell variable A) was not widely known/used. > > The business of tucking a copy of your posting into author.copy is another > > feature I could do without. > > I vote that this feature be retained. If you don't like it, set the > environment variable NEWSARCHIVE to /dev/null. I don't see why it is > necessary to complain about features that are so easily disabled. No feature is free, and even if any individual feature is quite cheap, the sum of them can place a substantial burden on understanding, documentation, and maintenance. (I admit that I overreact to creeping featurism.) In the case of author_copy, what happened was that I couldn't find the documentation for this new version of news on our system. I tried making author_copy an unwritable file--that kills postnews before it posts the article. Next I found someone who knew where the source code was; we looked and found the use of NEWSARCHIVE in the code and I dutifully trudged off and set NEWSARCHIVE=/dev/null, exported it, and re-executed .profile. This worked but still gave me a message and needlessly "wrote" a copy of the article. Turns out that the correct way to disable the feature (found by later experimentation on a hunch) is to set NEWSARCHIVE to a null string--the message, the copy, and everything goes away. (This seems not to be well known...after my original posting a couple of people asked how I had disabled it.) This is what the feature cost me, and tho I admit to stumbling around, I'm not a complete idiot. It would be more useful if there weren't other easy ways to solve the problem. -- Dick Dunn {hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd (303)444-5710 x3086 ...Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it's been.