henry (06/16/82)
The char array that news uses to hold the source path is dimensioned as BUFLEN, i.e. 128. Yes, Virginia, it is entirely possible to get long paths than this, for example: From: decvax!harpo!floyd!cmcl2!philabs!sdcsvax!phonlab!sdcatta!sdcattb!sdcarl!ucsfcgl!ucbvax!ARPAVAX:CAD:teklabs!tekmdp!emmyl (This is real, it's the one off tekmdp.1255.) The symptom is that you get urps like "Cannot reread article" if you have comprehensive error reporting from rnews (i.e. an arrangement whereby any complaints get mailed to somebody appropriate) and you simply lose news otherwise. Redimensioning it to LBUFLEN might fix this, although you'd need to fix at least one fgets() call as well, and perhaps other places. I haven't tried it yet; I'll report when I do.
martin (06/19/82)
using the inews program to shorten the news is great, in fact the simple way to do it is to use the output of euuname (in lib/news ?), this is a list of machine you want the world to know you talk too. i have lots of machines in my L.sys file that dont know about me and i don't think are reliable links for mail. as for the infomation passed to the user, why not give him the real infomation required to decide if the article is worth reading, just give him the machine and user who send it. example:- this article when read in lime From martin ........ this article when read anywhere else From lime!martin ..... putting in the Via line is a great idea, i can check long paths if i want to, but dont get bored by them normally (it is fun to see some very long path article, when it comes from your news partner!). i also helps when instructing users in news/mail usage, i have found users sending mail via all sorts of path just because thats the way news traveled the first day there old university/employers machine name popped up. news is a cause of some very long reply mail paths, lets improve the 'villan'. martin levy, bell labs, holmdel. (mail path as above,please shorten it manually!).