HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: tal@Warren.MENTORG.COM (Tom Limoncelli)
Subject: Re: stripping underlines from incoming news?
Organization: Mentor Graphics, Silicon Design Division
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 14:07:21 GMT

In <1992Apr12.005958.8942@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:

>It is actually not clear that commonality between news and mail actually
>buys us a lot; relatively few people use the same tools on both, barring
                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>the matter of gatewaying between news and mailing lists.  However, I think

I think a goal would be to have all people reading netnews and email
with the same program.

As someone that has trained novices to use news and mail, I find that
many users request this kind of functionality.  To them, it seems
obvious.  Both systems let you communicate, why not have the same user
interface?  I get many questions about wanting to do news-like things
in the mail readers and vice-versa.  Many mail readers are building up
to that point, but the user has to be a programmer.  I'd much rather
have one program to teach.  I think people would be more productive.

Tom
-- 
Tom Limoncelli -- tal@warren.mentorg.com (work) -- tal@plts.uucp (play)
"Tax cuts don't do any good for someone who is out of work," Gov. Bruce
Sundlun, D-R.I., said in denouncing Bush's economic rescue plan as woefully
inadequate.  "They don't need a tax cut.  They need a job." Feb 3, 1992
From: tgp@sei.cmu.edu (Tod Pike)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: cnews not filing into junk?
Date: 15 Apr 92 15:37:18 GMT
Organization: Software Engineering Institute

I have a slight problem with my new c-news system not filing articles into
"junk".  There is no error messsage, nothing, just no articles going into
junk.  I have junk in my active file with the "y" flag and everything, and
even tried using the SOURCE, but still no luck in figuring it out.  This is a
fairly recent c-news....

		Thanks,
			Tod Pike

Internet: tgp@sei.cmu.edu
Mail:     Carnegie Mellon University
	  Software Engineering Institute
	  Pittsburgh, PA. 15213-3980
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.admin
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: newgroup and newsgroups file
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1992 15:52:25 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <'$@byu.edu> gritton@byu.edu writes:
>>>...because a newgroup message does not reliably include a suitable
>>>entry for the newsgroups file...
>>How about an article header line designed for the job? ...
>
>Yes! The existing but seldom-used "Summary" header could be used for this.

This makes a lot of sense.  Anybody see any problems?  If not, I'm going
to add this to my son-of-RFC1036 draft as "recommended practice".
-- 
ISDN, n:  Incredibly Slow and Dumb      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
Networking                              |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: scs@iti.org (Steve Simmons)
Subject: Re: What happened to news.software.transport?
Organization: Industrial Technology Institute
Distribution: na
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1992 19:02:47 GMT

rsalz@uunet.uu.net (Rich Salz) writes:

>In article <1992Apr7.172222.28703@telesoft.com> garym@telesoft.com (Gary Morris @lone) writes:
>>What's the status of news.software.transport?
>I was the last person to put out an RFD on n.s.transport.

>Having other stuff to do (ah, the pain of real work), I let the issue drop
>for a few months.  I have been thinking about it for the past week or two,
>and decided that the name is bad.  News.software.transport seems to also
>"eat up" news.software.nntp.  Perhaps news.software.uucp is a better name
>for news.software.b?

>If nobody wants to do this, I might start it up again in a month or so.

Many of the discussions seem to have foundered because of namespace
problems.  IMHO, we need a general renaming of some of the news.*
groups under categories of transport, readers, and management.
Potential groups would seem to be:

    news.software.transport.{misc,nntp,uucp,...}
    news.software.readers.{misc,rn,nn,gnus,...}
    news.software.admin.{misc,cnews,bnews,...}

The biggest foundering point is the very broad overlaps between any
two (or three) of these.  I don't consider that a real problem, as
all True News Gurus have readers which handle crossposting.  :-)
-- 
 "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for you are crunchy and taste
  good with ketchup."  seen on a button, author unknown
From: lupe@ukw.uucp (Lupe Christoph)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: newgroup and newsgroups file
Date: 12 Apr 92 10:44:10 GMT
Organization: cic

Since I have switched to manual intervention for all control messages
handled by shell scripts (i.e. all except those handled by relaynews)
in C News, I have received a few newgroup and rmgroup messages.

When I had processed the most recent, I found that newgroup does not
update the newsgroup file. This is only done by checkgroups.

I'm using nn as a news reader; nn will display the description from the
newsgroups file for any newsgroup seen for the first time. I cannot see
this for a newsgroup that has not (yet) been entered into the
newsgroups file.

Is there any specific reason to not let newgroup update the newsgroups
file?  It is pretty trivial to implement, so I can do that. But should I?
-- 
| ...!unido!ukw!lupe  (German EUNet, "bang")     |  Disclaimer:            |
| lupe@ukw.UUCP       (German EUNet, domain)     |  As I am self-employed, |
| suninfo!alanya!lupe (Sun Germany)              |  this *is* the opinion  |
| Res non sunt complicanda praeter necessitatem. |  of my employer.        |
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: tal@Warren.MENTORG.COM (Tom Limoncelli)
Subject: Really ugly inews feature request
Organization: Mentor Graphics, Silicon Design Division
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1992 17:20:32 GMT

This is really ugly, but since inews is the catch-all for feeping
creatureism I hope it gets added in.

It would be really nice if inews could be more flexible when appending
the .signature.  If the user has .signature.news.group.name and is
posting to news.groups.name inews should pick up that signature instead
of .signature.

If there are multiple newsgroups on the line, pick the first newsgroup
that has a matching signature file.  If none do, start looking for
hierarchy names.  (i.e. posting to foo.bar.baz would search for
.signature.foo.bar.baz, .signature.foo.bar, and .signature.foo, before
defaulting to .signature.

With inews being re-written in C, this really shouldn't be too difficult.
A couple of stat()s wouldn't slow posting down much :-).

Tom
-- 
Tom Limoncelli -- tal@warren.mentorg.com (work) -- tal@plts.uucp (play)
"Tax cuts don't do any good for someone who is out of work," Gov. Bruce
Sundlun, D-R.I., said in denouncing Bush's economic rescue plan as woefully
inadequate.  "They don't need a tax cut.  They need a job." Feb 3, 1992
From: ckd@eff.org (Christopher Davis)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: What happened to news.software.transport?
Date: 8 Apr 92 21:55:56 GMT
Article-I.D.: loiosh.CKD.92Apr8175429
Distribution: na
Organization: Electronic Frontier Foundation Tech Central


 JB> == Jurgen Botz <jbotz@mtholyoke.edu> 
 GM> == garym@telesoft.com (Gary Morris @lone) writes:

 GM> What's the status of news.software.transport?

 JB> Good question!

 GM> Has this idea been dropped?

 JB> I hope not...

There's a mysterious curse on anyone who proposes it which causes them
to get swamped with work immediately after issuing an RFD (this happened
to me and someone else--Ron Heiby?).

I don't expect to have time in the near future to do it again, either...
--
Christopher Davis <ckd@eff.org> |    ECONOMIC OBSERVATIONS DEPARTMENT
System Manager & Postmaster     |  "There's always something going out of
Electronic Frontier Foundation  |      business in Central Square."
+1 617 864 0665  NIC: [CKD1]    |   -Rita Marie Rouvalis <rita@eff.org>
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.admin
From: gritton@alaska.caedm.byu.edu (Jamie Gritton)
Subject: Re: newgroup and newsgroups file
Lines: 29
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 92 11:27:14 MDT
Organization: Brigham Young University, Provo UT USA
	<1992Apr14.020413.19922@metapro.DIALix.oz.au> <'$@byu.edu>
	<bms46x.669@wang.com>
Reply-To: gritton@byu.edu

fitz@wang.com (Tom Fitzgerald) writes:

>> Yes! The existing but seldom-used "Summary" header could be used for this.
>> The big advandage of using a header (especially one that already exists)
>> is that it's only a convention, not a protocol change.

>The big problem with using an existing header is that people are already
>using it for other purposes.  I can anticipate someone sending out a
>newgroup message with "Summary: new group creation" (not realizing your
>convention), and causing everyone to get a newsgroup entry containing

>new.group.name       new group creation

>I'd vote for "Description: " or something similar and currently unused.

   The "Summary" header almost counts as something currently unused. It
would also not require the fixing of broken news software that does strange
things to unknown headers.

   With alt.* excepted, most newgroup messages are sent out by someone
"official" (i.e. David Lawrence), who would only need to be told once
about this. Even in the smaller regional hiearchies, it would only take
a few new groups if ant of the news admins notice it. And if nobody notices,
nobody can care.

   Besides, how much less useful is the description "new group creation"
than no description at all?
--
James Gritton - gritton@byu.edu - I disclaim
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: hirai@cc.swarthmore.edu (Eiji Hirai)
Subject: stripping underlines from incoming news?
Organization: Swarthmore College Computing Center, Swarthmore, PA, USA
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1992 22:51:31 GMT

I'm running Cnews 22-Dec-1991 and nntp 1.5.11.

Most of our users use brain-dead Macintosh news reading programs which don't
understand the _^H syntax for underlines.  So (as much as it pains me to do
this, sniff) I'm going to put something like the following in newsrun:

*** newsrun.orig	Thu Apr  9 18:46:44 1992
--- newsrun	Thu Apr  9 18:47:20 1992
***************
*** 118,123 ****
--- 118,127 ----
  			ln $f hold/$f
  		fi
  
+ 		# strip out _^H for brain-dead news readers.
+ 		sed s/'_^H'//g ${f} > ${f}.t
+ 		mv {f}.t {f}
+ 
  		# Decompress if necessary.
  		text=${f}.t
  		case $f in

Does this sound like a sane way to approach the problem?  Should I do this
stripping of underlines elsewhere?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!  *sniff*

--
Eiji Hirai <hirai@cc.swarthmore.edu>    :     :    :   :  : :: ::: :::: :::::
Unix Hacker for Swarthmore College      :     :    :   :  : :: ::: :::: :::::
Computing Center, Swarthmore, PA, USA.  Copyright 1992 by Eiji Hirai.
I don't speak for Swarthmore College.   All Rights Reserved.
From: xcea@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu (Chad Adams)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: bad distributions
Date: 10 Apr 92 15:37:44 GMT
Organization: Educational Computing Network

In article <1992Apr6.190027.23216@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu> xcea@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu (Chad Adams) writes:
>I have been watching the distributions that come into my site and have
>figured out that alot of the articles posted do not go to everyone
>because they have incorrect distributions.   Many, many, many have a
>distribution of 'all'.  Also there are quite a few 'USA, World, Na'
>also.  These will not work because of the upper case.
>Why can't inews check to see if it is a correct distribution (in
>/usr/lib/news/distributions) before it posts it and reject it if not.
>Just like it rejects articles posted to newsgroups not in 'active'.
>It seems it could at least head off stuff like 'world, local' and limit
>it to one word.  It is a shame to see all of these articles not reach
>all of the net just because someone did not know what to type.

After thinking about this for a while it would be good for it to take
distrtbutions like comp, alt, misc and change them to world.  How about
if the distrbution is in /usr/lib/news/distributions let it go.  Else
check to see if there is a directory of the same name in
/usr/spool/news.  If so change it to 'world'.  This is usefull for
articles that come in with a bad distribution like 'comp' and someone at
your site does a followup.  The followup will carry the 'comp'
distribution.  Without the extra check the article would be rejected
with a bad distribution even though they did not enter the bad
distribution.  This allow site to continue to accept articles with
screwed up distributions like comp, alt, misc (because it appears this
is too common to reject all of these) and still valadate locally posted
articles to stop stuff like 'il,in,ny' which dose not do what the poster
intended.

Right now we do not send out 'all' distributions from our site.  I have
the following line in my sys file:

xcea:all/all,!world,!na,!usa,!bgu,!local,!chi,!bionet,!soc,!eunet,!misc,!gnu,\
!aus,!de,!fj,!sub,!talk,!il,!alt,!inet:L1:/usr/ucb/mail xcea

It catches local user articles (and neighboring sites just for comparison)
with bad distributions (like 'everywhere') so I can send them back to
them and tell them their article never left our site and to repost it
with a correct distribution.

Chad Adams
-- 
Chad Adams              __               Educational Computing Network
Systems Programmer     /  ) /         /  University Park, IL  USA
1-708-534-0200        /    /_  __, __/   ECN, networking in IL since 1975
xcea@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu (__/ / /_/_/_(_/_   "Wherever you go, there we are."
Newsgroups: news.software.b,comp.sys.next.sysadmin
From: gary@sci34hub.sci.com (Gary Heston)
Subject: Re: cnews/nntp under NeXT Mach 1.1 -- really slow?
Reply-To: gary@sci34hub.sci.com (Gary Heston)
Organization: SCI Technology, Inc., Huntsville, Al.
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 22:24:11 GMT

In article <1992Apr8.170936.9371@blaze.cs.jhu.edu> heath@iceblink.cs.jhu.edu (Dave Heath) writes:
=We are running Cnews (evidently patchdate version 27-Aug-1991) and 
=nntp1.5.11 on an original next cube with operating system 1.1.
=All the news programs, libraries, and articles are located on an
=internal 660mb disk (not the optical), and the machine has 16mb of
=ram. We are getting fed from 2 sites and allow 1 or 2 people to read
=via nntp. The machine is not used for anything else.

=Anyway, the poor machine can't keep up. Slowly, /usr/spool/news/in.coming
=fills with unprocessed news. Processing does happen, but it is slow. If
=I turn off one of the feeds, in.coming slowly empties, but it takes days.
=Running relaynews by hand on a 62kb batch gives the following time output:

=1.8u 23.4s 5:32 7% 0+0k 6110+244io 0pf+0w

=(This is with nntpd temporarily disabled). Should processing a 62kb batch
=take 5 and a half minutes? I am assuming that most of the time is spent
=in i/o.

This is way too long; you have something seriously wrong. On a 16MHz 386,
I get 100K batches uncompressed and posted in about 10 seconds (and while
the drives are SCSI, I don't consider the overall setup to be any kind of
high-caliber performer).

=Is the NeXT simply too wimpy to keep up with the simple task of handling
=a newsfeed or is something wrong? 

I just set up a feed to a NeXT of some kind; they're having a blast and
haven't said anything about slow unpacking/posting.

=Here are some other facts:
=/usr/spool/news generally is under 90% full
=we are using dbz and nn.
=we were swapping a lot, but upgrading to 16mb ram stopped that.
=we get a full feed, except for alt.

A full feed is a load, but more of a comm load than a compute load.

=We would appreciate any help: possible ways to speed things up, bugs
=to watch out for, or configurations that run well on the next. Would
=this be helped by upgrading the NeXT os to 2.1?

I don't know about the os upgrade; you might check and see if you're
maintaining too much history. If so, the size of your history files could
be bogging things down. I'd not keep more than 14 days (to minimize the
file sizes), and if the feed sites are keeping long histories, cut it 
even further. Usually when old news gets dumped, it's over 30 days old
anyway, and doesn't get dropped like it should.

You might want to email uunet!sci34hub!tybrin4!trey and ask about
the performance he's seeing. (He's the NeXT I'm feeding; the other 
is fed through him.)


-- 
Gary Heston    SCI Systems, Inc.  gary@sci34hub.sci.com   site admin
The Chariman of the Board and the CFO speak for SCI. I'm neither.
"Always remember, that someone, somewhere, is making a product that will
make your product obselete." Georges Doriot, founder of American R & D.
From: hirai@cc.swarthmore.edu (Eiji Hirai)
Subject: Re: stripping underlines from incoming news?
Organization: Swarthmore College Computing Center, Swarthmore, PA, USA
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 14:50:56 GMT

ckd@eff.org (Christopher Davis) writes:
> your feed sites will get the mutated (non-underlined) versions!

Fortunately, we don't feed any sites.  However, as you, Henry Spencer
<henry@zoo.toronto.edu>, Jason Molenda <molenda@jason.msi.umn.edu> and David
Lawrence <tale@uunet.uu.net> have wisely pointed out, this is generally a
bad thing to do.

> I would put the code into nntpd; doing it on the fly isn't *that* big a
> hog, and that way your Mac users are happy.

I'll try this instead.  This way, our NFS mounted folks (myself included)
will get to read the articles unmolested.

> (What newsreader do your Mac readers use, anyway?  Maybe we could get
> Peter Speck to add underline handling to Nuntius, if he hasn't
> already...)

Good plan.  Currently, TheNews, NewsWatcher and Nuntius are all clueless
about underlines.  Sigh.

I hate brain-dead compatability.

--
Eiji Hirai <hirai@cc.swarthmore.edu>    :     :    :   :  : :: ::: :::: :::::
Unix Hacker for Swarthmore College      :     :    :   :  : :: ::: :::: :::::
Computing Center, Swarthmore, PA, USA.  Copyright 1992 by Eiji Hirai.
I don't speak for Swarthmore College.   All Rights Reserved.
From: ckd@eff.org (Christopher Davis)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Adding Lines: to Cnews
Date: 16 Apr 92 20:00:33 GMT
	<1992Apr16.151620.11347@zoo.toronto.edu> <43753@as0c.sei.cmu.edu>
Followup-To: news.software.b
Organization: Electronic Frontier Foundation Tech Central


 Tod> == Tod Pike <tgp@sei.cmu.edu> 

 Tod> Well, Henry, perhaps I'm confused then.  My NNTP daemon calls
 Tod> inews which seems to do a lot of checking.  Should NNTP call
 Tod> relaynews directly?

I bet it calls inews for POST, and relaynews for IHAVE.

(That's the way it should be, anyway.)

My distinction: locally-injected articles should pass through inews.
This includes mail-to-news gateways, as it ain't news till it's been
through somebody's inews (IMHO ;-).

All other articles (in our case, one small incoming UUCP feed and a
number of NNTP feeds) should get thrown to the voracious beast relaynews.
--
Christopher Davis <ckd@eff.org> |    ECONOMIC OBSERVATIONS DEPARTMENT
System Manager & Postmaster     |  "There's always something going out of
Electronic Frontier Foundation  |      business in Central Square."
+1 617 864 0665  NIC: [CKD1]    |   -Rita Marie Rouvalis <rita@eff.org>
From: pausv@sssab.se (Paul Svensson)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: newgroup and newsgroups file
Date: 15 Apr 92 09:33:29 GMT
Organization: Scandinavian System Support AB

henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:

>In article <1992Apr12.104410.3381@ukw.uucp> lupe@ukw.uucp (Lupe Christoph) writes:
>>Is there any specific reason to not let newgroup update the newsgroups
>>file? ...

>Yes:  because a newgroup message does not reliably include a suitable
>entry for the newsgroups file.  An automatic update could put in a line
>for the new group, but couldn't supply a description.

No: any description is better than none.  It is technically feasible
to supply the description on the Subject: line of the newgroup message;
it's a trivial mod to ctl/newgroup.  I know many newsgroup creators
just duplicate the "newgroup alt.xyzzy" on the subject line, but
so what ?  I say, go ahead, implement it on your site too.

If you're concerned about newgroups of existing groups changing
descriptions deposited by checkgroups, you can do the change to
only add a description if there isn't one already.

We've been running with (among other) this mod for more than a year,
and it's been very satisfactory.

-- 
Paul Svensson   _   /|   - Every absurdity needs a champion to defend it -
SM5SJS          \'o.0'   Scandinavian System Support    Fax: +46 13 115193
paul@sssab.se   =(___)=  Box 535        _             Phone: +46 13 111660
sunic!sssab!paul   U     SE-581 06  Linkoping, Sweden  Home: +46 13 121021
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: bernie@metapro.DIALix.oz.au (Bernd Felsche)
Subject: Re: newgroup and newsgroups file
Organization: MetaPro Systems, Perth, Western Australia
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 92 02:04:13 GMT

In <1992Apr13.153955.29032@zoo.toronto.edu>
   henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:

>In article <1992Apr12.104410.3381@ukw.uucp> lupe@ukw.uucp (Lupe Christoph) writes:
>>Is there any specific reason to not let newgroup update the newsgroups
>>file? ...

>Yes:  because a newgroup message does not reliably include a suitable
>entry for the newsgroups file.  An automatic update could put in a line
>for the new group, but couldn't supply a description.

How about an article header line designed for the job? If it
doesn't exist: tough luck, if it does and fits (easy to
check), then install it.

As for the name, how about
	Newsgroup-Kluge:  The rest of this line is used as newsgroup contents.

???
-- 
+-----+ Bernd Felsche                     _--_|\  #include <std/disclaimer.h>
| | | | MetaPro Systems Pty Ltd          /      \ bernie@metapro.DIALix.oz.au
| | | | 328 Albany Highway,              X_.--._/         Fax: +61 9 472 3337
|m|p|s| Victoria Park, Western Australia 6100  v        Phone: +61 9 362 9355
From: ckd@eff.org (Christopher Davis)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Generating an old log file somehow?
Date: 7 Apr 92 04:35:29 GMT
Organization: Electronic Frontier Foundation Tech Central

Let's say that you managed to misconfigure things so that you weren't
feeding anything out for, oh, a week or so.  You'd really like to push
some of the not-too-old news out the door, but you don't have any good
way of identifying it.

The best way, given that you're using nntplink, would be to generate a
new /usr/lib/news/log format file based on the contents of your news
spool.  The other solution would be to just make a big batch file using
"find" while grepping for locally-injected articles, but that would
probably leak distributions somewhat (not that it really matters given
the current leakitude...).

Is there a way to do this with C news (22-Dec-91, I believe) or should I
start running "find" now?
--
Christopher Davis <ckd@eff.org> |    ECONOMIC OBSERVATIONS DEPARTMENT
System Manager & Postmaster     |  "There's always something going out of
Electronic Frontier Foundation  |      business in Central Square."
+1 617 864 0665  NIC: [CKD1]    |   -Rita Marie Rouvalis <rita@eff.org>