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Re: Loop control

2001-10-08 10:50:02

Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> writes:

I would prefer USENET to work in the following way:

If an article arrives, with the same Message-ID as an already existing
articles, but with different content of the Newsgroup header, then the
article is posted to a join of the old and the new set of Newsgroups.

A few points:

First, Usenet has never worked this way, and in fact was required not to
work this way, so that assumption has been written into a lot of software.
One needs a *really* good reason to change that because it requires
upgrading all deployed server software; catering to mail to news gateways
that don't change the message ID like they generally should isn't likely
to be persuasive.

Second, this would do odd things around local policy for things like the
maximum crossposting level that the server is willing to propagate.  I can
see a few ways where this sort of feature would allow people to bypass
crossposting limits that otherwise would be imposed.

Third, this requires rewriting articles in the news spool, which has
significant and possibly prohibitive performance implications for a news
server.

It's not that bad of an idea, but it has rather wide-ranging implications
for the internal design of news server software and for various filters
and administrative controls.  News gets a *lot* of mileage out of knowing
that articles do not change in transit and are never changed after being
written into the news spool, only later deleted.  Breaking that assumption
pulls significant structural support out of the foundation, so to speak,
and the implications are more wide-ranging than I can easily work through.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)             
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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