henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (09/07/89)
In article <1989Aug31.234545.23296@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu> coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu (John L. Coolidge) writes: >... I urge Geoff and >Henry to put a notice in the release notes to C News saying "many people >think Lines: is a good idea. We don't enable it by default, and here's >why: <>. But if you think it's a good idea, turn it on by doing: <>." We'll look at this. >I'd probably even support a change to the RFC making Lines: an offically >required header (especially if they'd make References: one too). Geoff quite dislikes Lines:, especially since most of the people who use it seem to assume that it's accurate (which it frequently isn't, although the errors are usually not large). I personally have no strong feelings about it. The code is in there in inews, it's just commented out. If a revised spec made it mandatory, we'd uncomment it. We tend to think that this is one of the things that news readers can and should determine for themselves, for robustness if for no other reason, but we wouldn't rise in revolt if it were made a requirement. Since it isn't one right now, it will stay commented in the official distribution. >But I >greatly disagree with rewriting articles on the fly, regardless of how >useful the resulting header is. The ends simply do not justify the means. This we agree with, emphatically. We mess with Path and Xref because we must, and delete a few archaic or vestigial headers, but in general we have deep religious objections to "improving" articles. Especially in ways that make extra work on every site, hurting performance net-wide. -- V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (09/08/89)
In article <1989Sep6.205625.26565@utzoo.uucp> I wrote: >... We mess with Path and Xref because we >must, and delete a few archaic or vestigial headers... One or two moderators have expressed some anxiety about this, wondering if their carefully-crafted headers are going to get squashed. The full list of headers that C News seeks out and destroys, at present, is: Date-Received: Received: Posted: Posting-Version: Relay-Version: Illegal-Object: These are all thoroughly obsolete, relevant only to an earlier site and wrong for the one receiving the article, just plain junk, or all of the above. (Long-time news gurus will probably recognize everything in this list except Illegal-Object, which is there because some news around here goes via mail, and some sites hereabouts have this incredible whining mailer that insists on inserting these turds into the headers of almost every message.) -- V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu