jbuck@epimass.UUCP (Joe Buck) (12/03/86)
There's been a lot of discussion about the 50% rule. After
you've applied the official patch #1, this is what it does:
1) For each line beginning with '>', a counter is incremented.
2) For each line beginning with '<', the counter is DECREMENTED
(so diffs can be posted -- well, most diffs).
3) For articles with fewer than LNCNT lines (#defined in defs.h),
the rule is skipped (for you fans of short pithy comments).
(This does not include headers or .signature files).
4) If the article has more than LNCNT lines, and the counter
mentioned above is more than half the number of lines in the
article, the article is rejected.
Unfortunately LNCNT is also the variable used by readnews to
decide whether to pass an article through the pager or not.
As distributed, it is 14. It would have been better to add
a new variable to defs.h (it's also very ugly to do the four-line
.signature rule with two different "4"s in the code instead of
a symbolic constant).
I propose that any feature that causes lots of controversy in
the news software be controllable by a #define in defs.h, so
peoples' localize.sh scripts can fix it. I'm strongly in
favor of maintaining news in the "rn style", with a centralized
source of patches. If everyone cuts out the 50% rule (and the
four-line signature rule) in their own way, patches won't patch
and bugs won't get fixed.
If you really can't stand the 50% rule, consider:
1) Increasing LNCNT from your localize.sh. Foo on those readnews
users!
2) Use the -F option to rn to provide a different prefix string.
--
- Joe Buck {hplabs,ihnp4,sun}!oliveb!epimass!jbuck HASA (A,S)
Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, California