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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