The Great Renaming, Reorg-ing, or Removing (What to do about unix-pc.*)

[Mark H. Weber]

In article <1328 at icus.ICUS.COM> lenny at icus.ICUS.COM (Lenny Tropiano) writes:
>We can go over all the issues over and over again, but the whole idea
>was to get rid of the junk in the group, not add more to it.  When you
>get one or two messages from new users who see unix-pc.* as "unix on
>a pee-cee..."  I'll tell you what I do about it... simple, use the marvels 
>of KILL files.  I kill anything that's crossposted to comp.unix.sysv386, 
>comp.unix.aux, comp.unix.msdos, comp.unix.xenix.*,etc..    And you know what, 
>it kills 90% of the erroneous ones.  The other 10%, I get real friendly 
>with the "k" key in rn.

The problem with just killing inappropriate unix-pc.* articles is that
the unix-pc network has a high percentage of expensive long-distance
phone links, and all of these erroneously cross-posted articles are wasting
the money of individual unix-pc users.  As the number of people running unix
on their pc's goes up, the number of these articles will increase.

>I have two suggestions ... I personally am in favor of keeping things as-is,
>and stop the chances of someone snatching up the unix-pc.* hierarchy for
>386, 486, pc, etc... unix discussions.  Now wouldn't that defeat the
>whole purpose??

The purpose of my reorganization suggestions is to eliminate the need for,
and then retire, the unix-pc and u3b hierarchies. If the new comp.sys.att.*
groups are created, I would subsequently propose that we formally disband the
unix-pc and u3b hierarchies. If those proposals passed, we would pick a
cut-over date, at which time we would all change our news sys files to include
the names of the new groups, and alias the old names to the new names.
After the level of posting to the old groups drops off, we could eliminate
the old names from our sys files and ask Spaf to remove them from his list
of alternative hierarchies. The unix-pc users could keep their same
connectivity, just using different newsgroup names. As the distribution of
the new groups improved, and the availability of them from local backbone
sites increased, the individual long-distance phone links could be eliminated.

>Suggestion two... Rename the groups, maybe unix-pc-3b1.*, att-unix-pc.*,
>or unix-pc-7300.* ...  

This would clear up (somewhat) the name issue, but would not help the
distribution problems, as there are many sites that can't be bothered
to carry anything outside of the mainstream newsgroups.

>All followups to this go to news.groups where they belong! 

Yes and no. News.groups is really only for discussions of mainstream groups.
Because this discussion affects unix-pc.* (and u3b.*) as well, it needs to 
be discussed there as well. And because not everybody gets unix-pc.* (and
u3b.*), it needs to go to comp.sys.att, too (is this starting to sound 
familiar ???).

>Or maybe we should send them to comp.unix.sysv386 ... nah. :-)

How about a vote to create comp.unix.sysv68k.3b1 ?  :-) nooooooooo....

I know this is getting a bit tedious, and maybe I'm the worst offender.
But I really believe that 1) a change is needed, and 2) if we're going
to make a change, we should take the opportunity to fix all of the
problems at the same time.


-- 
  Mark H. Weber                   | Internet: markw at GVL.Unisys.COM  
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