DISTRIBUTIONS(5)

💅 DISTRIBUTIONS 💅

okay so this is the manual page for distributions, bestie — it lives in the InterNetNews docs and it's all about the recommended values you can put in a Distribution header field. 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

distributions — the recommended values for the Distribution header field, fr fr 💖

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

So the file pathetc/distributions is basically a little curated list of the relevant distributions plus their descriptions. 🦋 It's there to give local information to posters who wanna slap a Distribution header field onto their articles so they can restrict where those articles propagate.

⚠️ lowkey important caveat: this does not guarantee your articles won't leak somewhere else 😭 — that can totally happen because of a misconfiguration of a news server to which they're fed. no cap.

If you wanna know more about how a news server actually handles the Distribution header field, go read newsfeeds(5). iykyk 📖

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🫶 the line format

Every single line in this file is a distribution area followed by its description — and the description is encoded in UTF-8, bestie, keep up 💅 — after at least a whitespace. Like so:

fr      Local to France.
local   Local to this news server.
nj      Local to New Jersey.
usa     Local to the United States of America.

Blank lines? Ignored. Lines that start with a number sign (#)? Also ignored. we love a comment line that minds its own business 🙈

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👑 how clients see it

Any client that issues the LIST DISTRIBUTIONS command gets these recommended values, if available. ⭐

💀 but real talk: use of the LIST DISTRIBUTIONS command is not widespread — even though it's documented in RFC 6048 — and most news clients will never even ask for this file. it's giving underrated icon honestly.

And if this file is empty? Not an error, chill 🌈 the server will just send the client an empty response.

If the file is missing? Also fine — the server will send the client an appropriate response to indicate that the distributions list is not maintained on that server. 🧚

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🔥 bonus feature

The Distribution header field can also be automatically set by nnrpd if distrib.pats(5) is correctly configured. slay. ✨

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💜 HISTORY 💜

Written by Julien Elie for InterNetNews. 🫶

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🎀 SEE ALSO 🎀

• distrib.pats(5)
• newsfeeds(5)
• nnrpd(8)

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and that's the whole vibe check, bestie — this page is from INN 2.7.4, dated 2022-07-10. periodt. 💅🌟