jef@ace.ee.lbl.gov (Jef Poskanzer) (11/11/89)
Lately I have seen an increasing number of messages similar to the
appended one. As you can see, the References: line has been split at
256 characters. When rn reads this message, it sees that the line
after the split is not a valid header line, and therefore assumes the
header is over and the message has started. This causes various
unpleasant things to happen, the worst of which is ignoring the Xref:
line. If you have noticed that you're seeing some messages twice
lately, even though they have valid Xref: lines, this is probably why.
First: what software is breaking long lines? This has implications far
beyond the References: line, since long lines in the body of the
article are no doubt being broken too. We are an NNTP-only site - is
it responsible? I would like to fix this bug at our site, for aesthetic
reasons. However, even if a sizable percentage of the net fixes this
bug, the problem will remain, since it only takes one link it the path
to break the lines. Once they are broken, they stay broken.
Second: do we *really* need References: lines that grow without bound,
especially since most sites will not fix their transport software to
not break long lines? Way back in 1986 I changed my rn NEWSHEADER
macro to put only the immediate parent message-id in the references,
instead of the entire thread. The reason back then was rn's stupid
fixed-length interp buffer, but I think this is a good change in
general. If you think about it, you will see that this change is
guaranteed to not break any (mostly hypothetical) thread-following
software. If you want to make this change, edit the rn source file
common.h, and change "References: %R" to "References: %i". Making
this change will be far more effective than fixing the line-breaking
bug.
---
Jef
Jef Poskanzer jef@well.sf.ca.us {ucbvax, apple, hplabs}!well!jef
"Watch out, you might get what you're after..." -- Talking Heads
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From: gsmith@garnet.berkeley.edu (Gene W. Smith)
Newsgroups: alt.sex,alt.sex.bondage,alt.flame,alt.individualism
Subject: Re: Freedom to Keep Away from Gays?
Message-ID: <1989Nov10.093215.7830@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 10 Nov 89 09:32:15 GMT
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1989Nov9.200
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In-reply-to: keith@pawl.rpi.edu (Keith D. Weiner)fletcher@cs.utexas.edu (Fletcher Mattox) (11/11/89)
The default configuration for B 2.11.19 has a 256 byte buffer for the References: header, which is obviously too small in for these huge message ids.