On May 27, 2004, at 15:06, David A. Black wrote:

> OK... but let me clarify: this isn't about the question of which is
> inherently better or more convenient, a newsgroup or a mailing list.
> It's about the specific situation we're in, which is that we've got
> two forums that try to mirror each other but don't.  If the gateway
> were to be turned off, there would presumably still be a mailing list
> and a newsgroup.

I very much regret that this discussion is happening.

I agree that it is unfortunate that some messages don't make it between 
the two.  But the fact that some messages don't get through doesn't 
seem like justification to change things such that 50% of messages no 
longer get through (in either direction). I no longer read Usenet: I 
don't want to lose my Ruby friends who post using nntp because the link 
gets cut.

It seems to me that we're in a fairly string position here. My 
understanding is that some of the problems are actually repeatable. In 
particular DAB-initiated threads (I believe) are often not mirrored.

This situation seems amenable to experiment and debugging. David posts 
a message, and a day later a Ruby script goes out to a list of news 
servers and sees if it has arrived. If it arrives at all of them 
(including the server used by the gateway) then the problem lies in the 
gateway software or the mailing list. If it doesn't, then the problem 
might lie in David's news host.

Similarly, if there are repeatable drops from the mail->news side, we 
can test these too.

This is is bug, not a catastrophe. Let's track it down rationally and 
squash it.


Cheers

Dave