Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Why are C news Message-IDs so non-minimalist?
Message-ID: <1989Dec1.041358.26697@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1989Nov30.162609.9435@phri.nyu.edu>
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 89 04:13:58 GMT

In article <1989Nov30.162609.9435@phri.nyu.edu> roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes:
>	Given the underlying minimalist philosophy of C news, I'm surprised
>they went from the minimalist B news Message-IDs of the form <sequence@host>
>to the verbose <year.month.day.hour.minute.phase-of-moon@host> style, which
>is only exceeded in verbosity by Andrew Message-IDs.  Why?  ...

The crucial observation is that the *machinery* for generating the old
style is C code and is somewhat fragile in the presence of crashes etc.,
while the equivalent for the new style is robust and decentralized and
can be implemented in shell.  That is, we are being minimalist, but in
a non-obvious way.

Actually, we *do* agree that the message-ids are a bit long, and changes
to this are in the works.  One problem is that we can't do anything about
the length of the "host" part... and host names 20+ characters long are
not at all rare in articles these days.  The record in the survey I did
a few days ago was over 40, and Geoff claims to have seen still longer.
-- 
Mars can wait:  we've barely   |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
started exploring the Moon.    | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
