gnUSENET gnu.* Hierarchy

Introduction to gnu.*

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 very long time. As of May 2007, there is an effort underway to actively maintain the hierarchy, 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 2007, 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.

List of gnu.* newsgroups

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.

Carrying gnu.*

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 GPG 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-gpg-key.txt
# Key Fingerprint = C006 C321 A9A6 635D 0F6D  AEB2 7358 FE1D F904 5B7D
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

A very long time ago, control messages used to be sent from gnu@prep.ai.mit.edu or from news@prep.ai.mit.edu; these addresses are now entirely obsolete.

All control messages in the gnu.* hierarchy are signed with a GPG 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.

Download the gnu.* PGP public key.