comp.sys.sun is going un-digested

[William LeFebvre]

Welcome to the new comp.sys.sun.  This will be a new experience for all of
us, I am sure.  This message is being sent just to the comp.sys.sun list.
It serves as an introduction to the new undigested format.

Even though this newsgroup will have an undigested format, the parallel
Internet mailing list, Sun-Spots, will continue to be distributed in
digested form.  Before a digest is mailed out to the Sun-Spots recipients,
it will be split up into its individual messages and each message will be
posted to comp.sys.sun separately.  The digests will continue to be
archived at Rice.  Thus, every message appearing here will be archived,
and the body of the messages that appear here will be identical to the
ones in the digests.

The message headers will have some extra information in them to help those
who want to later find a message's digest.  Each message header will
contain a line that looks like:

	X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 7, Issue 20, message 3 of 12

This tells you that the message is from Sun-Spots Digest volume 7 issue 20
(or v7n20 in shorthand).  It also tells you that that issue had a total of
12 messages and that this was message #3.  This information can be used by
the industrious to make sure that no messages are lost.

In the digest form, certain messages have an extra line that looks like
"Reference: v7n9".  This indicates that the message is referring to a
message in a previous digest issue, specifically v7n9.  This information
will be carried over to the undigested comp.sys.sun.  It will appear as
follows:

	X-Issue-Reference: v7n9

I will strive to retain the subject lines, the original message ids and
the references lines (a "References" line is different from the
aforementioned "Reference" line).  But please remember that not all
messages appearing in this list were posted by Usenet readers.  Some were
mailed to be by Internet (Sun-Spots) readers.  These message will almost
certainly have no "References" line.  Some of the messages in the current
backlog have already had their original message-id (and and references
lines) stripped.  So for a time, you will see message ids that were
generated by our Usenet gateway machine, "kalliope", and you won't see any
"References" lines.  This should only last for a few days.

One unfortunate side effect of the current procedure is that the original
"Organization" line is lost.  All messages will have Rice University
listed as the organization.  This is not hard to fix, but I also don't see
it as being a serious problem.

If you encounter any problems with this new arrangement, or if you have
any ideas to help improve the comp.sys.sun service, please send them along
to the address "sun-spots-request at rice.edu".  If you think they are of
general interest to the entire readership, then just post them to this
list.  Remember that all postings still get forwarded to me.  This list is
still moderated.

I hope that this new format is satisfactory.  I know that many people have
been wanting this for a long time.  Now it is finally happening.

			William LeFebvre
			Sun-Spots moderator
			Department of Computer Science
			Rice University
			<phil at Rice.edu>