Path: utzoo!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!uunet!intercon!amanda@intercon.com
From: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: What should go in the References: line?
Message-ID: <1561@intercon.com>
Date: 21 Nov 89 17:53:08 GMT
References: <14619@well.UUCP> <19Nov89.535AAE456@b-tech.mi.org>
Sender: news@intercon.com
Reply-To: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Lines: 24

In article <19Nov89.535AAE456@b-tech.mi.org>, trp@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us
(Thomas Parker) writes:
> Even a competent programmer cannot write software to follow a linked 
> list where links are missing.  This will be the case for news.

Even aside from this pragmatic issue, there's another issue here that
has been peeking out from underneath Brad's & Karl's comments.  If a
perfectly valid news article causes RN to have problems, then a good
thing to do is to fix RN, *whatever workarounds may exist at the moment*.
Trimming the references line is just that: a workaround to a BUG in RN
that makes RN sensitive to line lengths.

It seems to be the case that other software has the same problem (BITNET
gateways, etc.), and this may mean that fixing RN is not enough.  Perhaps
we should change rnews & inews so that they wrap (not truncate) long header
lines to 80 (or 256, or whatever) columns.

Jeff's version of the References line makes the problem invisible for most
people, but it doesn't solve it.  Eliminating References altogether would
also make the problem invisible for most people, too...

Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation
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