Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ucsd!orion.cf.uci.edu!uci-ics!news
From: weemba@beaver.ics.uci.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: "Lines:"
Message-ID: <1989Sep9.010014.11378@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Date: 9 Sep 89 01:00:14 GMT
References: <8452@hoptoad.uucp>
Sender: news@paris.ics.uci.edu (Network News)
Reply-To: weemba@beaver.ics.uci.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Organization: Gnews-R-Us
Lines: 40
In-reply-to: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)

In article <8452@hoptoad.uucp>, gnu@hoptoad (John Gilmore) writes:
>It's trivial for each site to recompute the Lines: value if it wants
>it.  NNTP servers can compute it for their clients, either when they
>store the message, or when the client asks for it.

Hey, I'm glad to hear it.  I would like *somebody* to do it.  C news is
the easiest target, since Henry and Geoff stuck their necks out and made
the change.  You and Coolidge have convinced me that it's not 100% fair
to pick on C News here.

>						     If a news reading
>program doesn't want to read way out to the end of a 60K message before
>displaying the first screenful, fine -- it can read a few hundred lines
>and report the message as "long" rather than give an exact count.
>I mean, jeez!

Perhaps you merely think or conjecture "jeez" here.  I wouldn't bother
anthropomorphizing my program here--it's the programmer who doesn't
want to do it, after wrestling with buffering in the ideal case.  My
program can also say "too bad, unbuffered: your time is being wasted
to preserve USENET's Precious Bodily Fluids".  Everyone's trying to
pass the buck, is all.

>						    I fully agree with
>Geoff and Henry that "Lines:" is one of the bogus headers that is
>polluting the Precious Bodily Fluids of our network.

(Are you aware that by referring to PBF you sound like sarcastic support
for "Lines:"?  Please, see DR STRANGELOVE again and the allusion *supra*.)

You think the phone cost is the most important expense to minimize;
I believe--as Brad Templeton has argued--that user dead time is, that,
plus my own time spent programming.

Just as they've been convinced that "Supersedes:" has a use, perhaps now
they can be convinced that "Lines:" has a use--with the understanding
that it will vanish from C News when an agreement about where to put it
is achieved.
--
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba@beaver.ics.uci.edu, weemba@math.berkeley.edu)