flee@guardian.cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) (07/15/90)
Chip Salzenberg <chip@tct.uucp>: >Didn't anyone on BITNET think of passing articles along in ASCII and >translating them AFTER retransmitting them? Keep two copies of every article? Why? The bulk of news is english text and doesn't require high fidelity. >As far as I'm concerned, if they can't be troubled to translate ASCII >without lossage, munged sources are their own problem. "they" are really only a few sites that are doing Usenet<->BITNET gatewaying. And whatever one place does may not be the same as what any other place does. People interested in the munged sources probably aren't involved with the gatewaying at all. I don't believe in catering to broken transmission paths either, but I don't know of any pure data paths for news. The current NNTP software munges lines with embedded CRs and lines longer than 512 characters. And further munging can occur as an article wends its way through the innards of B News or C News. Ever try sending an article with a 5000 character Message-ID? If people are demanding higher fidelity to transmit sources, then they should be complaining about the links that are degrading their signal. -- Felix Lee flee@cs.psu.edu
chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) (07/18/90)
According to flee@guardian.cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee): >Chip Salzenberg <chip@tct.uucp>: >>Didn't anyone on BITNET think of passing articles along in ASCII and >>translating them AFTER retransmitting them? > >Keep two copies of every article? Why? The bulk of news is english >text and doesn't require high fidelity. True. Such a mechanism could be used for the sources groups only. It wouldn't be hard to maintain a list of them. >>As far as I'm concerned, if they can't be troubled to translate ASCII >>without lossage, munged sources are their own problem. > >"they" are really only a few sites that are doing Usenet<->BITNET >gatewaying. And the sites behind those gateways have the power to seek their newsfeeds elsewhere if their current gateways are unsatifactory. >I don't believe in catering to broken transmission paths either, but I >don't know of any pure data paths for news. I'm not looking for perfection; but I'm not going to give up my curly braces without a fight, either. :-) -- Chip Salzenberg at ComDev/TCT <chip@tct.uucp>, <uunet!ateng!tct!chip> "Most of my code is written by myself. That is why so little gets done." -- Herman "HLLs will never fly" Rubin