Path: utzoo!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cwjcc!hal!ncoast!allbery
From: allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Just how useful is crossposting?
Message-ID: <1989Nov18.191428.3783@NCoast.ORG>
Date: 18 Nov 89 19:14:28 GMT
References: <48887@looking.on.ca>
Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery)
Followup-To: news.software.b
Organization: North Coast Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, OH
Lines: 41

As quoted from <48887@looking.on.ca> by brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton):
+---------------
| In article <1989Nov14.195710.11774@NCoast.ORG> allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery) writes:
| >Note that this now incorporates the "% interp buffer overflow" hack of
| >including only the previous article in the References: line.  Also note that
| 
| ACK!!!  STOP!!!!
| 
| Please don't only include the parent article in the references line!  If you
| must trim it down, then include at the very least the 'root' article and
| the parent.   I think there was a move afoot to modify the RFC to say that.
> ( . . . )
| What this means is that a references-using reader either has to
| 	a) do a lot of hairy, time consuming things to re-link broken lines, or
| 	b) work only with a inews program that does the hairy things.
| 
| The latter is clearly more efficient, but requiring people to change their
| inews just to run a new reader is more painful.
+---------------

Brad, long References: lines currently break both rn and 2.11.19 inews.  Until
*both* are officially modified and propagated to a sufficiently large
percentage of sites, something is going to break anyway.  (2.11.19's breakage
is worse, because it effectively corrupts the article for downstream sites.)

It's *already* broken.  My hack is exactly that -- a hack to mitigate the
problems with broken software that already mis-handles References: lines.  We
need to fix the software, yes, but until that is done something is needed to
make existing news software bugs not get triggered.

Consider the hack a band-aid:  it's necessary now, but who wears a band-aid
for their entire lifetime?  I'll remove the hack when it isn't needed.  In the
meantime, push for fixing the software so I won't need the hack any more.

++Brandon
-- 
Brandon S. Allbery    allbery@NCoast.ORG, BALLBERY (MCI Mail), ALLBERY (Delphi)
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