5/21    Yep, and there it is... motdedit + motdedit2 + self righteous morons
        over writing other people's edits "because those other people didn't
        use motdedit like me so it's ok!" and now the motd is an unreadable
        fucking mess.  Can anyone explain to me how all this shit is better
        than when people just edited the damned thing directly or merged new
        edits with their own copy as necessary?  I don't understand how anyone
        can think this current situation is better than before we had all
        these scripts.
        \_ OP here to clarify: I'm saying broken pseudo revision control has
           resulted in a far bigger and unreadable mess than when the only
           rc was people kindly manually merging recent changes back in.  Now
           we have a bunch of pricks who don't bother because they used some
           script or other method that they have self determined to be the one
           true way and thus 1) are still blowing away other people's edits,
           2) don't feel guilty about it, 3) even worse they feel self
           righteously proper destroying other people's edit.  The various
           motdedit scripts also have the problem of mis-merging shit back in.
           There are bad merges.  There are things that *should* have been
           deleted (due to age, etc) that get restored, there are partial dupes
           of threads within other threads.  Motdedit has problems we've all
           seen.  Motdedit2 simply has different problems.  I don't want the
           cowardly censors deleting my shit but I also don't want it munged
           or mis-restored either.  Why can't we all just get along?  It just
           isn't that hard.  Technology will not solve this problem.  It's a
           people problem, not a scripting cleverness problem.  --op
        \_ I don't understand how anyone who has ever worked on shared
           files can think that having no revision control is better than
           having revision control.
           \_ I think the guy is saying that no revision control is better
              than broken revision control.
              \- this is not a technology problem. the problem is the people
                 who delete stuff they dont want to see, or people too lazy
                 to merge stuff. i use emacs to edit the motd and if i get a
                 warning the file has changed, i revery and yank my changes
                 back in. i dont need to use something like motdedit. you
                 cant prevent the write over problem and continue to allow
                 people to "expire" article and anonymity ... at the moment
                 it is expensive to de-anonymize and only possible in the case
                 of automated hosage. i think that is fine. --psb
                 \_ it's not at all expensive to de-anonymize.  You put the
                    file under CVS.  Problem solved.
                    (incidentally, you just blew away one of my posts)   -tom
                                   \-i dont think so. i dont think you
                                       follow how the emacs saving works.--psb
                                       \_ For some reason tom's real paranoid
                                          about people nuking his posts...
                                          probably because he does this so
                                          often himself. -- ilyas
                                          \_ tom?  blowing away other people's
                                             posts?  how can that be?  it seems
                                             impossible that such an open
                                             minded, intelligent, educated, and
                                             all around good guy would do such
                                             a hypocritical and horrid thing.
                                             anonymously, no doubt.  ;-)
                    \- i mean to de-anonymize under the current state of
                       affairs ... where you have to look at lastcomm or
                       idle times and correlate. i think it is maybe useful
                       to have this be expensive. --psb
        \_ just to clarify what motdedit2 does. It NEVER deletes anything. It
           NEVER overwrites other people's post. It NEVER clobbers. Period.
           It will ALWAYS guarantee that motd will either be of the
           same size, or more. Kapeesh??                        -kchang
           \- cat >> also never deletes anything. the point is that there are
              other tools to edit the motd that do delete things and people
              will use them if they are not prevented from doing so [say by
              some suid/sgid thing ... not that i am lobbying for that].--psb
                \_ ah yes, but motdedit2 has a "restore&merge" feature that
                   you can run from time to time that'll 1) ensure that your
                   entry is never deleted 2) ensure that NEW entries are
                   never deleted 3) easy to use with one command line  -kchang