jjoy@encore.com (Jennifer Joy) (06/20/91)
As a new admin I've spent the last few days reading over 400 news.admin and 200 news.software.b messages. (ok, so I didn't read ALL of them..8) I've got a tossed message that doesn't fit quite so neatly (or so it appears to me) into the pigeonholes of "bad news software so user suffers" and "bad newreader so user suffers." In this case, by apparent user error the all-important <space> after the Followup-To: line was removed. To the eye it looks the same, but because that space was removed, Pnews was prevented from removing the "blank" line. This resulted in a message with a pristine (<cough>, well, by most RFC quibbles) header, except for this silly Followup-To: line with no arguments. So this message was tossed on the floor by ukma (and other cnews mailers) and tagged as "non-header header line." Somewhere (and I hope someone can point me to the right spot) one of the RFCs must say why an optional header line, if included, cannot be blank. (and no, I've not had the time to read very carefully... remember your first weeks? 8) Anyway, the user (I think, I could be wrong! but I checked than Pnews does remove the line if the space is left there, and the line appears if the space is taken away) is at both ends of this one. and thanks to: Bill Davidson, Paul Eggert, Bill Fenner, and Dewey Henize who provided some helpful pointers! jennifer jjoy@encore.com
alexis@panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen) (06/20/91)
In article <15329@encore.Encore.COM> jjoy@encore.com (Jennifer Joy) writes: >As a new admin I've spent the last few days reading over 400 news.admin >and 200 news.software.b messages. (ok, so I didn't read ALL of them..8) You've got my sympathy. (Much more than Mathew... :-) >I've got a tossed message that doesn't fit quite so neatly (or so it >appears to me) into the pigeonholes of "bad news software so user suffers" >and "bad newreader so user suffers." In this case, by apparent user error >the all-important <space> after the Followup-To: line was removed. To >the eye it looks the same, but because that space was removed, Pnews >was prevented from removing the "blank" line. This resulted in a message >with a pristine (<cough>, well, by most RFC quibbles) header, except for >this silly Followup-To: line with no arguments. > >So this message was tossed on the floor by ukma (and other cnews mailers) >and tagged as "non-header header line." [etc.] As far as I'm concerned, this is an implementation bug in Pnews that never mattered until very recently. Some day I will get around to fixing it. Hopefully by applying someone else's patches. :-) --- Alexis Rosen Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix, NY alexis@panix.com {cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (06/25/91)
In article <15329@encore.Encore.COM> jjoy@encore.com (Jennifer Joy) writes: >Somewhere (and I hope someone can point me to the right spot) one >of the RFCs must say why an optional header line, if included, cannot >be blank... RFC1036, section 2, description of header syntax, says that the colon is followed by a space. Personally, I think this particular restriction is dumb, probably unintentional -- the wording suggests that the possibility of contentless headers was never considered -- and due for removal when 1036 is revised, but at present there's only one way to read it. -- "We're thinking about upgrading from | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology SunOS 4.1.1 to SunOS 3.5." | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry