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From: essick@uiucdcsb.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.notes
Subject: Re: remote cancellation
Message-ID: <3300006@uiucdcsb.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 2-Oct-84 22:39:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: uiucdcsb.3300006
Posted: Tue Oct  2 22:39:00 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 4-Oct-84 01:51:10 EDT
References: <1679@inmet.UUCP>
Lines: 44
Nf-ID: #R:inmet:-167900:uiucdcsb:3300006:000:2004
Nf-From: uiucdcsb!essick    Oct  2 21:39:00 1984

Why haven't I put remote cancellation into notes? Here are a few
reasons.

@ Once the data arrives on my machine, it's my property and I don't
want some random Joe on the other side of the network to zip those
babies away. Particularly if it's something I want to forward to 
my archive machine.

@ remote cancellation leads to the following scenario, which is also
  why notes doesn't let you delete a note or response if there are
  later notes in the discussion:
	1. person A writes a note
	2. person B writes a well-thought-out, rational, coherent response.
	3. person C writes a really stupid response
	4. person D writes a response that says "the previous response
	   is really stupid".
	5. person C goes back and deletes his response
	6. Person D now looks like a bozo for (apparently) saying
	   that person B's response was really stupid.

Steps 5 & 6 are avoided by not letting you delete a note/response if
there are later responses in that string. The situation gets more
complex if you let people do remote cancellation.

@ Since the notes networking is passive in the sense that it doesn't
	happen the instant you write an article but later when a
	daemon comes around to package all the new articles (which
	looks a lot like what batching, doesn't it!) the user
	typically has a reasonable window to decide that he didn't
	really like what he wrote and he can edit the text.
	All of a sudden, you don't need remote cancellation, the
	reason you wanted to cancel the article has been taken care
	of in a purely local manner.

Anyway, those are some of the reasons that I didn't implement 
remote cancellation of notes. It opens a number of problems with
consistency, you can get people screaming about the information
on their machine belonging to them, and the way I implemented 
notesfile networking you almost always have a chance to correct
it before it gets sent out over the network.

-- Ray Essick, University of Illinois
-- ihnp4!uiucdcs!essick  essick%uiuc.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa