Short-name files on rtfm.mit.edu are being phased out

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As some of you already know, the software which saves FAQs in the
archive on rtfm.mit.edu has, in the past, automatically created
short-name versions of file names in the archive that are too long for
some people to retrieve via the mail server because their mail
software won't let them type lines past a certain length (or they
can't figure out how to make it let them do it).

The short file names are a "feature" whose usefulness is limited and
which has made it necessary for numerous complex, gross and somewhat
unreliable hacks in other software that is used to maintain *.answers,
the List of Periodic Informational Postings, and the rtfm.mit.edu
archives.

We, the maintainers of *.answers and of the rtfm.mit.edu archive, have
decided that this feature is more trouble than it's worth. As of
today, the FAQ archiving software will no longer create the short-name
files in the archive, and over the next few months, the existing
short-name files in the archive will be removed.

I am notifying you FAQ maintainers about this so that if you have any
references to the short-name files in your FAQs, you can remove them.
I suggest you replace them with the *.answers archive file name(s) of
your FAQ(s), since those file names are, in the vast majority of
cases, short enough for people to type.

The maintainers of mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu are discussing the
possibility of adding continuation-line support to the mail server
(e.g., putting a backslash at the end of a line in a message to the
mail server to indicate that it is continued on the next line); if
such support is added, it will make the short-name files even more
useless than they are already :-).

If you have any questions about this, please contact the moderators of
*.answers, using the address news-answers-request@mit.edu. If you
*really* think that the short-name support should be put back, feel
free to try to convince us, but you should have pretty compelling
arguments or we aren't going to buy it :-).

Jonathan Kamens | OpenVision Technologies, Inc. | jik@cam.ov.com

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