Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!math.lsa.umich.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!rpi.edu!tale
From: tale@turing.cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence)
Subject: Re: parallel sys file entries in C News
Message-ID: <YM=%=1_@rpi.edu>
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Computer Science, Troy NY
References: <1990Aug28.123323.2598@robobar.co.uk>
	<1990Aug28.172106.20512@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: 29 Aug 90 05:51:03 GMT
Lines: 55

In <1990Aug28.172106.20512@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu
(Henry Spencer):

   On an unrelated topic, something we should perhaps address in documentation
   is that there seems to be a popular myth that "!local" in the distribution
   subfield has some kind of magic effect.  It doesn't.  Unless your local
   articles actually contain "Distribution: local" lines, "!local" is quite
   meaningless.

One thing about this "popular myth" is that it is very useful, Henry,
and I wish you wouldn't attempt to _discourage_ it.  If you instruct
your users that there is such a thing as a Distribution: local, even
indirectly as the answer for the most restrictive distribution
question in rn's Configure, than of course when the articles do
contain it they should be restricted.  I personally have
/all,!local,!rpi in most of my sys entries and I don't consider it to
be some sort of "magic effect".  I use local distribution for
checkgroups messages (son of a gun!  isn't that what spaf puts in the
sample checkgroups messages?) and burst digests; I could use an
organisation prefix but since other people use my script to burst
digests too I made it a nice generic local.  Also, some other sites
get rpi.* and I really don't want to be inflicting my own personal
checkgroups on them.  (Simple fix for that too, I know.  Just start
doing checkgroups without posting them; feed it to ctl/checkgroups
directly.)

Do you know what the intended distribution of
alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork was?  C'mon, one guess.  Somehow this
person got a notion that Distribution: local meant something, and it
isn't that terrible to have a nice generic notion like that which can
be carried from site to site by users.  I am under the impression that
perhaps this person got the notion from when they ran B News and local
was special cased (does B News do that in the code?).  Another thing
that lends itself to this impression is that when I _wasn't_ blocking
local I would get complaints from B News sites I fed which were
getting "bogus local distribution rejected!" messages filling their
logs as their nntpd kept spewing back rejected-try-again codes and my
site kept trying to offer the articles.  I think this only happened
with control articles that came through.  I also don't know whether
this was because !local was in his ME: line, but I think it does have
it there -- whether it did at the time, I don't know.  It's sort of a
mystery to me what those problems were since I didn't poke through the
B News sources and his sys file.

The nice "magic effect" I get by putting !local in my sys entries is
certainly worth having it there.  !local is not at all meaningless at
my site, even when my own local articles (which often contain
"Distribution: rpi" which does in fact get a wider distribution than
local) do not contain it because it means I am not forwarding articles
that I received which someone else really seemingly intended to not go
anywhere.
--
   (setq mail '("tale@cs.rpi.edu" "tale@ai.mit.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))
 The most remarkable thing about looking at a picture of myself was the sudden
   realisation that my hair is in fact parted on the left and not the right.
