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The gnu.* USENET (or gnUSENET) hierarchy is a collection of newsgroups about the GNU Project. Most of the newsgroups correspond to GNU mailing lists and just provide an alternate way for people to read and post to those mailing lists if they prefer a USENET interface to a mail interface. There are also a small number of newsgroups that do not have corresponding mailing lists.
The gnu.* newsgroups are carried by most large and many small news servers, but the hierarchy went unmaintained for a long time. It has recently become actively maintained again, with the newsgroups and mailing lists again linked to each other using the gatewaying abilities of GNU Mailman.
This page lists the current information on how to carry and maintain the gnu.* newsgroups. This information has changed as of 2002, so if you are a news administrator, you may need to update your server configuration. If you are interested in reading the gnu.* newsgroups and your local server does not carry the current newsgroup list, please refer your local news administrator to this page.
Here is the list of newsgroups in the gnu.* hierarchy. The format of this file is in USENET checkgroups format, suitable for processing with a program such as INN's docheckgroups program to add those newsgroups to a news server.
To automatically create new gnu.* newsgroups and remove defunct ones, please honor all control messages in gnu.* from usenet@gnu.org that are signed by the corresponding PGP public key (see below). The INN control.ctl entry is:
## GNU (Free Software Foundation) # Contact: usenet@gnu.org # URL: http://www.gnu.org/usenet/usenet.html # Key URL: http://www.gnu.org/usenet/usenet-pgp-key.txt # Key Fingerprint = 01 97 49 7B EC 11 F3 20 19 B6 FE 56 00 9A 37 D2 checkgroups:usenet@gnu.org:gnu.*:verify-usenet@gnu.org newgroup:usenet@gnu.org:gnu.*:verify-usenet@gnu.org rmgroup:usenet@gnu.org:gnu.*:verify-usenet@gnu.org
Control messages used to be sent from gnu@prep.ai.mit.edu or from news@prep.ai.mit.edu; these addresses are now obsolete. As a transition aid for sites that still honor control messages from those addresses, control messages will also be sent from them for some time.
All control messages in the gnu.* hierarchy are signed with a PGP signature using the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG). News servers should have a mechanism that allows them to verify those signatures; see your news server documentation. For the time being, we are using an RSA key for compatibility with old PGP software, but we strongly encourage you to use GnuPG to verify signatures since it can handle both RSA keys and newer DSS keys, and it is free software unlike many other PGP implementations.
Download the gnu.* PGP public key.
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Copyright (C) 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-0301, USA
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
Updated: $Date: 2006/04/05 10:12:14 $ $Author: ramprasadb $