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Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84 SMI; site sun.uucp
Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!prls!amdimage!amdcad!decwrl!sun!guy
From: guy@sun.uucp (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Sorry about those orphaned responses
Message-ID: <2664@sun.uucp>
Date: Sun, 18-Aug-85 20:23:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.2664
Posted: Sun Aug 18 20:23:53 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 21-Aug-85 06:26:39 EDT
References: <18800007@hpfcla.UUCP>
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Lines: 30

> For unknown reasons, our gateway generates "orphans" to the news side
> more than it should.

It shouldn't generate *any* orphans.  Like it or not, netnews is a datagram
service.  Any news software which can't deal with duplicated, missing, or
out-of-sequence articles is behaving incorrectly.

> ...take the habit of quoting whole articles into responses, just because
> news doesn't tie responses to "basenotes" (as notes does).

The habit of quoting whole articles has nothing to do with the way news and
notes present articles.  Quoting the relevant bits of articles makes for
better responses even if you can get at the article being replied to (which
you can do in "vnews", as well).  A reply is tied visually to the point to
which it's replying; a split-screen display of the original and the reply
leaves it up to the user to tie the two together.  The inclusion of whole
articles when it's not necessary is the result of laziness, pure and simple.

> Or, consider the habit of cross-posting to many newsgroups at once.  On
> the notes side, such articles show up in each different notesfile (and
> consume redundant disc space).  Why?  Because a feature was added to
> news at some point, but not to notes.  That doesn't necessarily make
> notes inferior, just *different*.

Both the Orphaned Response problem, and the cross-posting problem, are
problems which can be fixed by improving "notes"; I believe versions of
notes which fix these already exist.  If this is the case, then versions of
notes which don't fix them are definitely inferior.

	Guy Harris