Subject: ISSUE: Length and final dots of newsgroups descriptions.

From: Julien ÉLIE <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:22:54 +0200

Hi,

I wonder whether final dots should not be added to descriptions.

      For your newsgroups file:
      example.admin.info      About the example.* groups (Moderated)

-> About the example.* groups. (Moderated)

      example.moderated         A moderated newsgroup (Moderated)
      example.test              An unmoderated test group

-> with final dots.

Maybe it should also be specified that the length of such descriptions
SHOULD NOT be too long:  a reasonable length not to exceed is 56 characters.

Source:
    ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/pgpcontrol/FORMAT

group.name<tabs>description.[ (Moderated)]

There should be one or more hard tabs (assume 8 column tabstops) to
get to a description; if the group.name is more than 24 characters,
use just one tab.  The description should start with a capital and end
in a period and not be more than 56 characters (80 - 24) long.  If the
group is moderated, it should have " (Moderated)" following the
period, not counted as part of the length of the description.  The
goal is to keep the total line under 80 columns, so if the group name
is 25 characters long you'd have eight less description characters to
work with.

-- 
Julien ÉLIE

« Tu l'as trop écrasé, César, ce Port-Salut. »

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From: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:10:30 -0700

> I wonder whether final dots should not be added to descriptions.

There was general consensus in the group a while back that sacrificing an
occasionally valuable character to fairly pointless punctuation wasn't a
good idea (but also that it wasn't something that should be standardized,
so I think that language moved to USEAGE, if it's in any of our drafts).

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email-masked])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:32:13 GMT

>is 25 characters long you'd have eight less description characters to

I think the group decided that "Tale's rules" for checkgroups lines were
two arcane to standardize, and the best that could be done was to document
them (for historic pouposes) in USEAGE.

As for the final '.', it is useless, and they have been systematically
excised from the uk.* hierarchy (and the relevant test in Tale's
pgpcontrol script modified accordingly).

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: [email-masked]      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5