geoff@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer) (08/31/89)
Once more: we never intended to promise that C news will do all the same things as B news, so talk of "gratuitous changes" is meaningless. We didn't start from a B news base. We simply did not implement some things that B news did implement. If you want B news (or A news or notes), you know where to find it. We feel that grafting Lines: headers (indeed most headers) onto passing articles is in poor taste. In fact Lines: does appear in the "cherished RFC" (1036), where is it marked "optional". One more time: The behaviour of B news (or C news or A news or notes or NNTP) is not a specification for news software, especially not for message format. -- Geoff Collyer utzoo!utstat!geoff, geoff@utstat.toronto.edu
tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff) (08/31/89)
In article <1989Aug31.035929.2430@utstat.uucp> geoff@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer) writes: > The behaviour of B news (or C news or A news or notes or NNTP) > is not a specification for news software, especially not for > message format. By the same token: RFC 1036 *is* a specification, not just a few interesting ideas on a dinner napkin to be picked and chosen from at whim, with the parts one doesn't like relegated to an "rfcerrata" <chuckle> file. "We regard this and that as an error in the RFC" is not the most useful attitude one could imagine from the authors of something like C news, which aspires to broad acceptance itself. It might be more seemly to concentrate on the "Cnewserrata" file for now. :-) -- "We walked on the moon -- (( Tom Neff you be polite" )) tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET
geoff@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer) (09/01/89)
Agreed that RFC 1036 is a specification, but RFCs (or other specifications) do sometimes contain errors, and it is unwise to blindly implement an erroneous specification. Believe me, we implemented quite a few things required by RFC 1036 even though we dislike them (e.g. ihave/sendme); our classification of a few parts of RFC 1036 as errors was not inspired by our like or dislike of those parts. To refute a popular misconception, we are not trying to convince everyone to run C news. We find C news useful and hope that some others will too. Some people will find that it doesn't suit their needs and they should not run it. -- Geoff Collyer utzoo!utstat!geoff, geoff@utstat.toronto.edu