Xref: utzoo news.software.b:2719 comp.sources.d:3936 Newsgroups: news.software.b,comp.sources.d Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Improved statistics script for C News w/logging patch Message-ID: <1989Aug4.164427.3810@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <1989Jul31.053214.3554@vicom.com> <1989Aug4.000449.14891@utzoo.uucp> Date: Fri, 4 Aug 89 16:44:27 GMT In article tale@pawl.rpi.edu writes: >HS> I assure you, we dislike whitespace in Message-IDs as much as you do, but >HS> it appears to be legal and hence we accept it. > >That depends very much on what you call whitespace. Tabs are >inherently evil anyway and RFC 1036 specifically disallows "blank" >(presumably ASCII 32 but possibly meaning "whitespace"). Geoff is the RFCologist in this, and he says the question actually does not seem to have a well-defined answer. One problem is that RFC1036 explicitly defers to RFC822 and says that RFC822 overrides RFC1036, but the relationship isn't exactly crystal-clear when the two disagree, and they do on the details of Message-ID formats. More important to us is the old Internet rule of being tolerant in what you accept from other sites. C News accepts anything that isn't likely to cause serious trouble downstream. (For example, we don't care whether an article has a Subject: line, even though it is officially mandatory, but we do insist that it have a Path: line, since the loop-breaking algorithm needs that.) Spaces in Message-IDs don't seem to do any harm. Tabs we do have to do something about, since the history file format implicitly assumes no tabs in Message-IDs. -- 1961-1969: 8 years of Apollo. | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1969-1989: 20 years of nothing.| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu