Ten years ago I began the olduse.net exhibit, spooling out Usenet history in real time with a 30 year delay. My archive has reached its end, and ten years is more than long enough to keep running something you cobbled together overnight way back when. So, this is the end for olduse.net. The site will continue running for another week or so, to give you time to read the last posts. Find the very last one, if you can! The source code used to run it, and the content of the website have themselves been archived up for posterity at The Internet Archive. Sometime in 2022, a spammer will purchase the domain, but not find it to be of much value. The Utzoo archives that underlay it have currently sadly been censored off the Internet by someone. This will be unsuccessful; by now they have spread and many copies will live on.

---

I told a lie ten years ago.

You can post to olduse.net, but it won't show up for at least 30 years.

Actually, those posts drop right now! Here are the followups to 30-year-old Usenet posts that I've accumulated over the past decade. Mike replied in 2011 to JPM's post in 1981 on fa.arms-d "Re: CBS Reports"

A greeting from the future: I actually watched this yesterday (2011-06-10) after reading about it here.

Christian Brandt replied in 2011 to schrieb phyllis's post in 1981 on the "comments" newsgroup "Re: thank you rrg"

Funny, it will be four years until you post the first subnet post i ever read and another eight years until my own first subnet post shows up.

Bernard Peek replied in 2012 to mark's post in 1982 on net.sf-lovers "Re: luke - vader relationship"

i suggest that darth vader is luke skywalker's mother.

You may be on to something there.

Martijn Dekker replied in 2012 to henry's post in 1982 on the "test" newsgroup "Re: another boring test message" trentbuck replied in 2012 to dwl's post in 1982 on the "net.jokes" newsgroup "Re: A child hood poem" Eveline replied in 2013 to a post in 1983 on net.jokes.q "Re: A couple"

Ha!

Bill Leary replied in 2015 to Darin Johnson's post in 1985 on net.games.frp "Re: frp & artwork" Frederick Smith replied in 2021 to David Hoopes's post in 1990 on trial.rec.metalworking "Re: Is this group still active?"

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Edward John Betts (edward)
• Holger Wansing (holgerw)
• Timothy Martin Potter (tpot)
• Martijn van Brummelen (mvb)
• St phane Blondon (sblondon)
• Bertrand Marc (bmarc)
• Jochen Sprickerhof (jspricke)
• Ben Finney (bignose)
• Breno Leitao (leitao)
• Zlatan Todoric (zlatan)
• Ferenc W gner (wferi)
• Matthieu Caneill (matthieucan)
• Steven Chamberlain (stevenc)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Jonathan Cristopher Carter
• Reiner Herrmann
• Michael Jeanson
• Jens Reyer
• Jerome Benoit
• Fr d ric Bonnard
• Olek Wojnar

Congratulations!

Backups are fun and exciting! Restores are exciting, in a terrifying and stressful way. Fixing serious bugs is gratifying, in a depressing way. I am glad to announce two software releases: Obnam version 1.6.1 and larch version 1.20131130. Obnam is my backup application, larch is a Python copy-on-write B-tree implementation that Obnam uses. I've uploaded the new versions to Debian unstable and to my own apt repository at [code.liw.fi] (also for wheezy). (I don't have the energy to upload to Debian backports: help is welcome there.) These are mainly bug fix releases, and minor improvements. The larch release fixes serious problems, and everyone should be upgrading. NEWS for larch:

• Serious bug fixed: the "KeyError" crash for reference counts. This was false memory use optimisation, which triggered a rare bug in related code. Repeatable test case by Rob Kendrick, and helpful analysis by Itamar Turing-Trauring.
• Serious bug fixed: another "node missing" bug. This crash was caused by a bug that overwrote on-disk reference count groups with zeroes. Repeatable test case by Rob Kendrick.
• Fixes to fsck from Antoine Brenner.

NEWS for Obnam (combining versions 1.6 and 1.6.1, both released today):

• Fix Debian package dependencies correctly.
• Stop logging paramiko exceptions that get converted into another type of exception by the SFTP plugin in Obnam.
• obnam-benchmark can now use an installed version of larch. Patch by Lars Kruse.
• Obnam has been ported to FreeBSD by Itamar Turner-Trauring of HybridCluster.
• Backup progress reporting now reports scanned file data, not just backed up file data. This will hopefully be less confusing to people.
• The list-keys, client-keys, and list-toplevels commands now obey a new option, --key-details, to show the usernames attached to each public key. Patch by Lars Kruse.
• New option --ssh-command to set the command Obnam runs when invoking ssh. patch by Lars Kruse.
• obnam clients can now be used without being an existing client. Patch by Itamar Turner-Trauring.
• New option --ssh-host-keys-check to better specify how SSH host keys should be checked. Patch by Itamar Turner-Trauring.

Bug fixes:

• Fix"obnam list-toplevels so it doesn't give an error when it's unable to read the per-client directory of another client, when encryption is used. Fix by Lars Kruse.
• Fix the encryption plugin to give a better error message when it looks for client directories but fails to find them. Fix by Lars Kruse.
• obnam list-toplevels got confused when the repository contained extra files, such as "lock" (left there by a previous, crashed Obnam run). It no longer does. Fix by Lars Kruse.
• The SFTP plugin now handles another error code (EACCESS) when writing a file and the directory it should go into not existing. Patch by Armin Gr linger.
• Obnam's manual page now explains about breaking long logical lines into multiple physical ones.
• The /~/ path prefix in SFTP URLs works again, at least with sufficiently new versions of Paramiko (1.7.7.1 in Debian wheezy is OK). Reported by Lars Kruse.
• The Nagios plugin to report errors in a way Nagios expects. Patch by Martijn Grendelman.
• The Nagios plugin for Obnam now correctly handles the case where a backup repository for a client exists, but does not have a backup yet. Patch by Lars Kruse.
• obnam ls now handles trailing slashes in filename arguments. Reported by Biltong.
• When restoring a backup, Obnam will now continue past errors, instead of aborting with the first one. Patch by Itamar Turner-Trauring.

My friend Martijn from Talentspender is co-organizing a Give Camp in Berlin. They are looking for IT professionals and designers who want to spend one weekend of their time to support non-profit organizations to solve a specific problem at the Give Camp. It is for a good cause and there is no further commitment after the Camp. Plus you will be provided with free food and drinks. So if you are interested and happen to be in Berlin between 30. November and 02. December 2012 have a look at their website and register for the GiveCamp. Quoting from their flyer:

A GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where technology professionals donate their time to provide custom solutions for non-profit organizations. Voluntarily, without further commitment and for a good cause: the long-term strengthening of the organizations. How does it work?

• Teamwork of experts during one weekend, with regular input from the NPOs
• Clearly defined projects, to be completed at the GiveCamp
• Young professionals mentored by experienced experts
• Meals and drinks are provided

Who are we looking for?

1. Software developers, database administrators, designers and entrepreneurs
2. From students to senior experts
3. Team players with enthusiasm for interdisciplinary projects

More diversity in Debian skills This blog post has been co-authored with Francesca Ciceri. In his Debconf talk, zack said:

We need to understand how to invite people with different backgrounds than packaging to join the Debian project [...] I don't know what exactly, but we need to do more to attract those kinds of people.

Francesca and I know what we could do: make other kinds of contributions visible. Basically, we should track and acknowledge the contributions of webmasters, translators, programmers, sysadmins, event organisers, and so on, at the same level as what we do for packagers: DDPO, minechangelogs, Portfolio... For any non-packaging activity that we can make visible and credited, we get:

• to acknowledge the people who do it, and show that they are active contributors in the project;
• to acknowledge the work that gets done, and show the actual amount of non-packaging work that gets done in Debian every day;
• to allow non-packagers to have a reputation, too: first of all, they deserve it, and among other things, it would make nm processing trivial.

Here's an example: who's the lead translator for German? And if you are German, who's the lead translator for Spanish? Czech? Thai? I (Enrico) don't know the answers, not even for Italian, but we all should! Or at least it should be trivial to find out. To start to change this, is just a matter of programming. Francesca already worked on a list of trackable data sources, at least for translators. Here are some more details, related to translation:

• Translations can be tracked via the i18n robot (and relative statistics). This works only with teams who activated the robot and actively use the pseudo-urls in their messages on localisation mailing lists. Some translators don't bother to do it but it's ok to only support the main workflow. It beats extracting .po files from l10n-tagged BTS bugs at any rate.
• DPN and website translations: for wml pages there's a specific field to be extracted for each translated page: grep for maintainer="name" on normal wml pages, while for DPN translations we have a specific translator="name" field. The problem is that this field is not mandatory, so sometimes there's no indication of the maintainer. Again, it's ok to only support the main workflow. Anyway, this is preferable to the cvs log: often the commit is done by the coordinator of the team and not by the actual translator. See above for the alternative solution of using the statistics provided by the i18n bot.
• DDTSS: since the new release of DDTSS-Django, done by Martijn van Oosterhout about a year ago, the contributions are by default non-anonymous. This should be easy to track.
• : it is more complicated because in the wiki we do not have a proper l10n translation workflow, so the only thing that can be tracked are changelogs $LANG/* pages. A nice idea would be to have translated pages list the version of the page that was translated and who did the translation.
• translation of debian manuals and release notes: usually in the translation of manuals and long documentation there is a specific translator field.

And here are some notes about other fields:

• DPN editors: for each issue there's a list of editors at the bottom of the page. In the wml: grep for editor=.
• Artwork: artwork submitted via debianart are easy to track on the portal. Anyway usually you can find the author in the license and copyright file.
• Programming: the only thing we have is the list of services which can be expanded if needed.
• Press and publicity: there seems to be not much besides svn logs.
• l10n-english: The Smith Review Project page has some tracking links. Other activities can probably only be tracked, at the moment, via mailing list activity.
• Events: we can use the "main coordinator" field on www.debian.org/events/$year/$date-$eventname.wml: grep for <define-tag coord>; for events not published on the http://www.debian.org, but only on http://wiki.debian.org, the coordinator or the contact for the event is usually present on the page itself.
• Sysadmins: we haven't asked DSA.

And finally, if you are still wondering who those translation coordinators are, they are listed here, although not all teams keep that page up to date. Of course, when a data source is too hard to mine, it can make sense to see if the workflow could be improved, rather than spending months writing compicated mining code. This is a fun project for people at Debconf to get together and try. If by the end of the conference we had a way to credit some group of non-packaging contributors, even if just one like translators or website contributors, at least we would finally have started having official trackers for the activities of non-packagers.

This week saw again some progress for samba packages. May is indeed my samba month..:-). So, I uploaded samba 3.5.8~dfsg-3 and -4. For whatever reason, -3 was rejected three times and, as I already tagged it in our SVN then started adding changes for an upcoming -4, I finally uploaded that -4. It fixed about 10 more bugs and the bug count is now 62. Upstream also release 3.6.0-rc1, which I uploaded in experimental and which fixed an RC bug. I also began working on Pootle 2.1.6 as an attempt to resync with upstream. I integrated patches by Alaa Abd El Fattah to have it use dbconfig-common to setup a database. However, this revealed that more invasive work is needed to satisfy dependencies...that may depend on the database backend chosen by users. As I'm quite ignorant with these things, I might need some help, here. I uploaded a new release of xgridfit to fix an important bug and avoid an NMU. xgridfit is team-maintained in pkg-fonts. I'm not very active in this team ATM. I shoul dresume work for it as I proposed a talk about it at Debconf11..:-) I continued hard work on French DDTP. Martijn made changes to stats pages and it makes interesting challenges to complete. You know I like challenges.. Smith reviews continue to go on: I launched a call for translations for slapos.tool.format and started the review of ntfs-3g. Finally, on Saturday....I upgraded churro (aka i18n.debian.net) to squeeze. Really. All alone..:-)...on a server that lies in Spain. "Meme pas peur" (not even scared) as we say in French. I'm really highly confident in squeeze upgrades now....and I was right. After only 5 hours work (mostly looking at packages downloads and configuration), nearly everything was back to work. As of now, we got three glitches, with only one bignot yet fixed:

• the wiki that uses MoinMoin is severely broken. So, as of now, http://i18n.debian.net yields an error (but all other i18n.d.n URLs are working)
• HTTPS was broken for ddtp.debian.net, which prevented people to login to work on the DDTP. I partly fixed that today (Monday) and Felipe will have a closer look at VirtualHosts in Apache to fix the remaining glitches
• cron jobs for i18n robots were no longer working. After some headache and googling, it turned out one file in /etc/cron.d was group-writable, which cron translates to "WRONG INODE INFO".

Quite active week, finally. This week should be quieter as I'm on holidays with Elizabeth in our country house in Normandy, in Seine valley (this house belonged to Elizabeth parents and she inherited it). I'm in deep love with this house and there are tons of things to do there...which leaves few room for hacking. We'll see what will be next weekly summary!

How does one define one's "national identity"? One way is to look at where a person is born. By that definion, I could be called Flemish, Belgian, or European, whatever you think about it. Another way to look at it is how one feels about one's own identity. This, of course, is a much more accurate way to describe a person; and by that definition, I am either Belgian or European. I do not feel any affinity with much of the so-called "flemish" identity, nor do I wish to be associated with it any more than is strictly necessary. Obviously, some people feel different about that for themselves. This I can understand. In fact, the statement to feel more Belgian than Flemish is probably not one that is very common in this general area. I am not stupid; I know that Belgium is not a Nation (it is a state, but that is a different matter). I just do not feel a lot of warm fuzzy feelings about Flanders. Naturally, other people have other feelings about that. This, too, I can understand. The logical result of the above is that my personal opinions about the somewhat convoluted politics in this country are not shared by many; that when I state my opinion, I may expect opposition, or at the very least someone stating why they disagree with me. This, of course, I can also understand. But what I cannot understand is that every time I state my opinion, someone must come out and insult my intelligence by telling me I "do not have a clue". Please do not mistake my disagreement for misunderstanding. Martijn asks me to "check the facts". Let's do that, shall we?

1. There's been a judgement by the constitutional court that the current situation regarding which party may run for election in the BHV region is unconstitutional.
2. One group of politicians wishes to resolve this issue by splitting the BHV region in two. That would certainly solve the issue.
3. Another group of politicians dislikes this solution. They may be willing to go along, but they want other concessions before they will do so. This is what I referred to when I said that there were "a huge heap of all kinds of side issues" in my previous post.
4. The first group does not wish to make such concessions. Some of their numbers have even stated in the press that there is no need to make them, because, given the first point, there's only one solution and that is to split.

That last point is, of course, complete and utter bullshit. It would hold merit if there was only one way to solve a constitutional crisis; but by definition, there are always at least two ways: one is to change the law to comply with the constitution, the other is to change the constitution to make the law no longer be unconstitutional. So a group that feels strongly about one of these two possible solutions should be prepared to negotiate with the other group so as to hammer out an agreement that benefits both parties. In some cases, this will mean doing things that they do not completely like; but if they're not willing to do that, at all, they have no business being politicians. For the longest time during the early negotiations, however, both parties have stubbornly refused to even acknowledge the other position, let alone talk about it. Now, for clarity, I'm not advocating that the latter of the two options in that previous paragraph is what should happen. Frankly, I don't even care what happens, so long as they manage to resolve the issue at hand in some way. What I do care about, however, is that this country has been in a near-constant state of stalemate over these past few years for an issue that only matters to politicians; I don't care who or what a group of people in a (to me) obscure part of the country can vote for. This country needs a stable government which can act on things that actually matter. Like, say, the international economic crisis of the past two years; I think it matters much more whether the man in the street has a job than whether John Q. Politician will past these next elections.

Martijn isn't too sure about Debian testing, though he doesn't go into much detail about the "not sure" bits. Well, Martijn, even though I could really use some more detail, let me make an attempt:

• Debian Testing isn't the perfect thing to use at all times. Especially right after a release, when people start uploading all kinds of crap to Debian unstable, it's probably better to stick with Debian Stable for a while. Right before a release (such as the time we're in right now), however, using testing on a laptop is probably a much better choice if you want reasonable up-to-dateness of the software on your system.
• In case you didn't know, testing does get security updates these days (since quite a few years already, actually).
• In the pre-sarge days, installing Debian almost required some magician to do it for you. These days, however, installing Debian is much easier, so if you're afraid of that, don't be. Also, the default "desktop" installation can compete with Ubuntu in many areas already, although there surely is some more work to be done.
• Debian is a bit more conservative with updates than is Ubuntu, even in the development distributions ('testing' and 'unstable'). This is generally a good thing if you don't want your system to break in all kinds of "interesting" ways right when you don't have the time (although that might still happen, though more so with unstable than with testing).
• Most of the bits that are available in Ubuntu are also available in Debian; and in Debian, in most cases they're done more thorough, because of the difference between Debian's and Ubuntu's approach to package maintenance: in Debian, every package has its own maintainer who is solely responsible for the package; in Ubuntu, maintainers are responsible for a whole lot more packages, which improves their view on the distribution as a whole, but makes it more difficult for them to follow up on the state of individual packages.

In all, I still prefer Debian over Ubuntu, mostly because of the higher attention to detail you'll find in Debian; I find that ubuntu developers usually don't have the time to pay too much attention to pesky details. This makes the system work slightly better. But, of course, YMMV, and if you decide to stay with Ubuntu because you think it works better in your particular use cases, more power to you!

Test successful: the new (and very nice) Apple keyboard (the wired one, if only because I need the numeric keypad regularly) is coffee-safe. Incidentally: Anyobdy has instructions for mapping the “fn” key to function as an insert key? On the console, it produces 00 83 d0, but in X it doesn't send anything (according to xev). Comments welcome. (Martijn proposes to use F13 instead, which I guess I'll do meanwhile.) Update: Hmm. Seems I lost the s key. q, a and y also stopped working for a time but are back again. I hope s will dry out soon, I need it. (and y is again not working. Drat.

Bits from the Debian i18n meeting (Extremadura 2007)

From December 12th to December 15th, Junta de Extremadura hosted another one of the Debian Meetings; five i18n guys shared ideas, food, buses and fun with the Debian KDE maintainers. We would like to thank Extremadura for hosting us during the Hispalinux Meeting 2007, the event was held at Universad de Derecho (Law University) in Caceres, Spain.

These are the minutes, results and notes from our work, it is a brief description but hopefully complete of what we have done and what is still missing/pending.

Thanks to Cesar (cek) we had the chance to work on churro (i18n.debian.net) locally; the server is still running a 2.4 kernel because of some "tick" problems with 2.6 series, the last one tried was 2.6.21 and we should try newer ones, in order to support upgrades and not get stuck with 2.4, we hope Cesar will find time to test new Debian kernels.

First, let me introduce everybody to the services, robots and resources being hosted by i18n.d.n:

• MoinMoin wiki for local and simple reference documentation, it contains all the links to the below resources. (http://i18n.debian.net/wiki/)
• Pootle experimental server
• dl10n scripts, aka dl10n robots (codename Lion), these scripts are responsible for the status of pseudo URLs used by some translation teams, by the Project Smith and by the NMU Priority List for i18n NMU Campaign
• Synchronization of the i18n material used by the Debian website to generate translation statistics about PO and PO-debconf
• Generation of Compendium PO files per-language
• Different types of statistics
• Other non user-visible services like a full source mirror for stable, testing, unstable and experimental, used by the scripts and robots.
• DDTP, Debian Descriptions Translation Project
• DDTSS, The Debian Distributed Translation Server Satellite, a web front-end for DDTP, now integrated to DDTP to use the Database back-end instead of the e-mail interface.

And, at some point, we found important to state clear the acronyms and names used in related DDTP projects/tools:

• DDTS, Debian Description Translation Server, this is the main "back-end" used in DDTP, it tends to be the interface between translator tools (present and future ones) and the database;
• ddt.cgi is a CGI interface that is able to provide info for specific packages or translations, including diffs, related packages and active/inactive descriptions.
• DDTC which is the old (and still functional) command line client for DDTP.

We took the chance to organize a few things on churro, old accounts were cleaned out and removed, we moved from /org to /srv and got more GBs of space to the "playground". Old files were also removed and some are schedule to deletion on early 2008. With the reallocation of /org we also find some more space to /home and /var, we reorganize some of the links on the web space (specially to remove services from people's accounts), and we changed the mirror script to also synchronize the Packages and Contents files.

Grisu and Martijn worked mainly on DDTP and DDTSS integration. DDTSS now provides statistics for stable, testing and unstable, we are also working with Debian Med to provide support and infrastructure to a specific audience, like packages related to Medicine. The conversion to talk directly with DDTP/DDTS database also provided:

• Fetching new translations is almost instantaneous and marks translation as requested (avoiding duplicated works via the e-mail interface).
• After sufficient reviews occurred, the upload is instant
• Committed DDTS / DDTSS / DDTP website generation into SVN
  • Added READMEs for the above directories

DDTSS now announces the user using authentication because of its integration with the Database backend used by DDTP. Quick trivia: DDTP is now a compound of 25 languages occupying 18 GBytes.

A few days before the meeting we had the offer to use "AUTOBYHAND" to upload a package with the Translation-* files. The package is now called 'ddtp-translations' and we worked during the meeting to create scripts to build the package and to test it on the archive side. This approach allow Debian i18n Team to upload new translations and remove old ones (or inactive ones) without bother FTP Master Team. Special thanks to Anthony Town, he has been working with us to prove tips, fixes and info on how to produce the package and the scripts. The code is available in the debian-l10n SVN under pkg-ddtp-translations:
http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/debian-l10n/pkg-ddtp-translations

In our case, "BYHAND" processing consists of a simple tarball of the main,contrib,non-free /i18n/Translation-*, we decide to work on a set of scripts to make it easier to create new packages (ddtp-translations) in a consistent way and keeping debian/changelog up-to-date. We also made some suggestions to the script what will run on the archive side to check the tarball structure, base on the examples of debian-maintainers and debtags (tags-override).

One of our initial targets for the meeting with regards to Pootle and Debian was to try big PO files per language, fortunately, Nicolas and Friedel were able to increase Pootle performance enough to get a few languages from DDTP loaded in Pootle. Using the upstream Pootle-diet branch, which uses a database back-end for the generation of statistics, the time to browse the DDTP POs of a language (~20.000 files) went down to a dozen of seconds.

Speaking about Pootle, Friedel gave us a good picture of what is coming next in terms of Pootle's development. There are improvements planned in the areas of permissions and rights delegation, as well as file management (for projects and templates). Improved management of terminology projects is also planned.

Improvements in the QA capabilities of the translate toolkit and Pootle are planned to help with the "false positives" of the pofilter checks. Better reuse of existing translations will become possible by using better translation memory techniques. There is also work planned on formats and converters involving, for example, XLIFF, TMX, TRADOS and WordFast.

Another pending task for quite a while was the CVS migration to SVN, it is now done, with a new layout. Commits to the CVS were disabled and every single script or resource depending on CVS should be changed to use SVN. For now, we are publishing (via HTTP) the status files generated by the pseudo-urls robots until we can fix the scripts to re-enable the commit of the files. You can find them here: http://i18n.debian.net/debian-l10n/status/

We are pretty happy with the changes and results of the work during those days, but we still have some items pending on our TODO list:

• More advertisement and usage information about PO Compendiums
  There are two use cases are identified:
  
  • Filling new PO files.
  • QA work to find inconsistent translations.
  Maybe Eddy would love to do that? :-)
• Extend the duration of the statistics history. (Nekral)
• Debian packages of the services running on churro
  • DDTP (Grisu)
  • DDTSS (Martijn)
  • dl10n (Nekral)
• DDTP: add some scripts to handle packages with version in the description (e.g. kernel and kernel modules) (Martijn)
• DDTP: Standard generation of the translation tarballs (faw)
• DDTP: document the bracketed stats on the main page (faw)
• DDTC: should be updated to match the current features. Documentation to ease integration with procmail. (Nekral - low priority)
• Implement mail service for translation teams with their own robots (e.g. Dutch) (faw)
• Collect data from http://www.debian.org/devel/website/stats/ (Nekral)
• http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po/,
  http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po-debconf/
  are built based on the churro material. It would make more sense to build these statistics on churro (Nekral)
  • We could "fork" the page and add some fancy new features on these pages (Nekral)
  • Add information from the coordination page to indicate that a translation is ongoing. (Nekral)
• Pootle: missing review indication. Hard with PO back-end. (Friedel)

There are a couple more reports to be sent but they are more focused on i18n specific questions, tools and plans for 2008. So, probably those will be sent only to debian-i18n mail list. If you are interested, please, stay tuned. :-)

Posted on d-d-a: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/01/msg00002.html
And a big thanks to Nicolas François (aka nekral), he helped me a lot making notes, preparing the text and reviewing it; and was patient enough to wait for the report while I was solving some personal problems.

Smigs commented:

"perhaps the ultimate example of this is the ebay uk announcements feed - the items date back to 2004 and it totals 267.86 kB - so big that the livejournal syndicator refuses to use it at all. I went so far as to contact ebay about it, but they didn't do anything."

I'm having a little problem getting some money from ebay (which I might write about after I resolve it), so the above comes as no surprise to me. That sounds like the Carlsberg of feeds: probably the fattest feed in the world. Martijn wrote:

"I think a feed should contain all content the other versions of the page have, it's an alternative (link rel etc.) after all. Imho, parsers should just be made smarter, and drop things they consider to be 'too old'."

I agree that a feed should be the same content as other versions (or at least the main one of them should... see my site's filtered feeds) but my comment about being too big and too old applies to the non-feed versions too: Recent Changes pages should drop items which aren't recent. I disagree that parsers should drop things that are too old because it would do more harm than good: generally, you can't tell how old an item claims to be until after you've read it; and a lot of publishers have subtly broken clocks (which is why my aggregator uses ordered lists, instead of sorting by timestamps like planet). Related link: Problogger: 34 Reasons Why People Unsubscribe from RSS feeds.