Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!iuvax!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: proposed new distribution category
Message-ID: <20709@looking.on.ca>
Date: 24 Sep 89 05:18:53 GMT
References: <757@uvaarpa.virginia.edu> <4379@ncar.ucar.edu> <285@van-bc.UUCP> <4386@ncar.ucar.edu> <642@ccssrv.UUCP> <1989Sep23.012427.8789@sq.sq.com>
Reply-To: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 16
Class: discussion

Actually, I used to argue that distribution and hierarchy should be
completely disjoint, and in fact this was the reason that "Distribution:"
became a header -- in the old days there was no such thing.

But later I came to realize you can't have them entirely disjoint.
Quite often you want to have a group called "local.foo" which is
a local version of a global "foo" group.  For example, most places have
a "dist.general" which was the local version of net.general.

Of course, you can still implement this by making the two disjoint, by
naming the local groups "local_general" instead of using the distribution
as a prefix, but it sure is convenient to do the latter and get
automatic correct distribution.

-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473