Path: utzoo!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!iuvax!watmath!looking!brad From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: What should go in the References: line? Message-ID: <49816@looking.on.ca> Date: 19 Nov 89 08:04:14 GMT References: <14619@well.UUCP> Reply-To: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd. Lines: 37 It is not a matter of being a competent programmer -- let's not get insulting. It's a matter of being an efficient programmer. Yes, you can chain back through references, *if* you have gotten the whole chain (which you quite often haven't, due to dropped articles, expired articles and articles that come out of order.) But chaining back one at a time is very inefficient, even in the (more rare than you think) case where the whole chain is on your machine. Let's say I've killed tree with root . You're suggesting that I either: a) For every article that comes through, chain backwards up to its root, one article at a time, to see if it's , or b) Every time an article comes in that references or any child of , save that in the kill directory. The first is too slow to be usable, the second uses immense amounts of disk space, particularly since it is stored per user, not per site. In fact, I want to display a series of articles as a tree with an X client. Now I have to chain through dozens of already-read articles one article at a time just to see the tree? If enough people are going to be annoying and break the references line, then the only choice may well be to have rnews programs repair them as they come in. But repairs will never be perfect, particularly if *any* part of the chain gets lost. Or, in the end, the readers may have to just throw away articles that don't have a usable header. That's what humans do on the net these days. Put a subject of '' or "forwarded from bitnet" or "orphaned response" on your message, and I just toss it. I haven't the time to piece through to find out what the article's about. -- Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473