rccall@dartvax.UUCP (R. Christian Call) (06/11/84)
< this is the first line of this article > < this is the second line of this article > Okay, everybody on USENET seems to be convinced that there exists a bug somewhere which causes the first lines of articles to disappear. I myself have never noticed any mutilated articles on the net. Does anyone know whether the dreaded line-eater really exists? If by some chance the first line of this article, as it appears on your system, claims to be the second line instead of the first, send me mail so that I'll know the line-eater is for real. But if you happen to have good reason to believe that it doesn't exist, please let me know. Thanks in advance.
guy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris) (06/12/84)
> < this is the first line of this article > > < this is the second line of this article > > > Okay, everybody on USENET seems to be convinced that there > exists a bug somewhere which causes the first lines of > articles to disappear. I myself have never noticed any > mutilated articles on the net. Does anyone know whether > the dreaded line-eater really exists? There wasn't a bug that caused the first lines of articles to disappear. There *was* a bug that caused the first bufferful (512 or 1024 bytes) of articles whose first line of text was indented (with a blank or a tab) to disappear. The bug wouldn't eat either of the lines listed above; it would have eaten the first line of This is the first line of this article This is the second line of this article and the second line, and quite a bit of text after that. The bug's fix is fairly well known, and 1) People have been putting in lines at the front of articles, usually not indented; whether their rationale was correct or not, it had the desired effect. Our machine sticks a blank line at the front of all such articles. (Some people have stuck in *indented* "bug-catcher" lines at the beginning of articles with an otherwise *non-indented* first line, which has the exact opposite effect.) 2) More sites have fixed the bug, especially sites that pass a lot of articles through them; I remember somebody saying the bug didn't affect articles posted locally, only articles passed through the site. So you probably aren't seeing as many munched articles as before. Unfortunately, the version of B news that's distributed with 4.2BSD has the bug, so any new 4.2BSD news site is likely to re-introduce the bug. Guy Harris {seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy
brian@sdccsu3.UUCP (06/12/84)
Arrgh. The original news line eater bug was simply this: when the first character of the body of the message was whitespace, the first 1024 bytes or so of the message were dropped. One fix to this cured the problem UNLESS the first character was a tab. In those cases, the messages with spaces for indentation on the first line, or with a null line (ie, the first character was a newline) would get through ok, but then one with a tab would get lost. Most sites should have fixed it by now, unless they either can't (do binary-only sites have it fixed yet?) or don't care. The number of lost lines has dropped but as recently as a couple of days ago I saw one. (Yes, I sent them mail). Does this help people understand what was going on? -- -Brian Kantor, UC San Diego ihnp4 \ Kantor@Nosc decvax \ akgua ----- sdcsvax ----- brian dcdwest/ ucbvax/ "I'll never be cruel to a gin and tonic again!"
mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (06/12/84)
To my knowledge, almost all the bug containing machines on Usenet are fixed. The one machine I know of with the bug is foxvax1. Putting bug killers in does more harm than good nowadays. Mark
jdd@allegra.UUCP (John DeTreville) (06/13/84)
Well, \I/'m still receiving munched news.
Cheers,
John ("jrs2@ihuxe.UUCP (J.R.Smithson) (06/18/84)
1 2 Yes, The bug does exist.
jrs2@ihuxe.UUCP (J.R.Smithson) (06/20/84)
1. this was the blank line which the followup provided but I changed to this. 2. this is the second line 3. this is the third line Sorry about this but I honestly expected my reply to the question of the line eater to have removed the first line. I did post an followup 2 weeks ago where my 1st line was munched.