Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site hou3c.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!eagle!mhuxl!ulysses!burl!hou3c!ka From: ka@hou3c.UUCP (Kenneth Almquist) Newsgroups: net.news Subject: Re: Notesfile vs. USENET (flame) Message-ID: <255@hou3c.UUCP> Date: Sat, 11-Feb-84 18:43:51 EST Article-I.D.: hou3c.255 Posted: Sat Feb 11 18:43:51 1984 Date-Received: Wed, 15-Feb-84 04:34:03 EST References: <884@druxt.UUCP> <17800001@hp-dcd.UUCP> Organization: Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ Lines: 31 From Donn Terry: Orphaned responses are in general a symptom of news' occasional unreliability, not any problem of notes directly; you see the orphaned responses in reading news, it just isn't as visible that its an orphan. (How many times have you thought "I don't know what this is a respnse to". Usually one blames ones memory; with notes, you know that you aren't losing your mind, you havn't seen anything about it before!) The problem is that I may have very well seen something on the topic before, but because a notesfile system somewhere hadn't seen anything on the topic before it gave the article an "Orphaned response" title. If I don't recall what an article is a response to in vnews, I use the parent command to find out. I don't think that notesfile solves the "I don't know what this is a response to" problem unless the response is a response to a "base note". If you wanted to see the full text of Donn Terry's article you could search for articles by him, but I know of no automatic way of finding his article. I know that notesfile flattens discussions into lists in order to keep the user interface simple, but I think that discarding all traces of the original tree-like structure of the discussion is a mistake. On the other hand, the parent command doesn't work if the article came out of notesfile because notesfile doesn't use the References line. All right, the next release of vnews will attempt to determine the parent using the title. Although this is will be useful for newsgroups which are gatewayed to Arpanet mailing lists, it is largely another case of, "notefile doesn't interface with USENET properly, so I have to write additional code to pick up the pieces." Kenneth Almquist