Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!apple!oliveb!olivey!jerry
From: jerry@olivey.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Require "Lines:"?
Summary: A byte count is not portable
Message-ID: <47596@oliveb.olivetti.com>
Date: 5 Sep 89 19:03:00 GMT
References: <1989Sep1.220844.300@sq.sq.com> <1989Sep2.200616.8524@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu> <1989Sep3.083308.1640@paris.ics.uci.edu> <1989Sep3.160552.25045@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: jerry@olivey.UUCP (Jerry Aguirre)
Organization: Olivetti ATC; Cupertino, Ca
Lines: 28

In article <1989Sep3.160552.25045@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu> coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu (John L. Coolidge) writes:
>Finally: If Lines: is to be required, I'd like to see it expanded (either
>by the same name or by some new name, Size: for instance) to carry wc-like
>information. The byte count is clearly useful, and I can envision word
>count information having some value at all. If it's required that we spend
>the time and space to provide Lines:, let's at least generate a bunch of
>useful information all at once.

This came up before in a discussion about NNTP batching.  A byte count
set by the orriginating system is not going to be portable to other
systems.

For example, NNTP transmitts articles in "network" format.  That means
it terminates each line with a carriage-return and a line-feed.  So a
byte count would have an additional byte for each line than would be
present if the article was on a typical Unix system.

This is not just a transport issue;  Some systems are going to store the
article in different formats.  Not only will the line terminators change
but some systems might use fixed length records or (yuck) translate tabs
into blanks.

The "lines" header is not a CRC for checking whether the article has
been corrupted.  It is not going to help in article transfer or
batching.  It is useful for getting a "human" estimate of the size of an
article though a count of "words" or "printing" characters would be more
useful.
					Jerry Aguirre