Path: utzoo!utstat!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!munnari.oz.au!labtam!foster!cbp
From: cbp@foster.avid.oz (Cameron Paine)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Who generates the `Lines:' header field?
Summary: A summary of responses, an observation and a solution to original
	problem.
Message-ID: <1990Aug10.164353.6188@foster.avid.oz>
Date: 10 Aug 90 16:43:53 GMT
References: <1990Aug5.064837.23881@foster.avid.oz> <1990Aug5.075054.11185@zoo.toronto.edu> <1990Aug6.061150.3939@csusac.csus.edu> <1990Aug7.155622.2420@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: Avid Systems Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia.
Lines: 41

In <1990Aug5.075054.11185@zoo.toronto.edu>, I asked about policy relating
to the Lines header field. Fortunately, my question didn't spark a flame
war and the responses (both postings and e-mail) fell into three
categories: policy, personal preference and solutions.

The policy seems to be clear. Lines is an optional field and if it is to
be included, it should be supplied by the posting agent. Henry Spencer
pointed out that B News does this and C News doesn't. He contended that
the field was unnecessarily wasteful. Interestingly, his article had a
Lines field.

On reflection, I believe that Henry's rationale makes sense. Assuming
articles have on average N lines (where 10 < N < 100), the field would
require strlen("Lines: 99\n") (ie 10) characters. Multiply this by the
number of articles received and stored each day and we're looking at a
small but significant volume of data.

As an aside, C News article IDs are more than 10 characters longer than
their B News counterparts (on most installations). Thus, the size of a
C News header is larger than a similar B News header. :-)

Responses in the personal preference category related to the user
interface of the reading agent. Henry Spencer suggested that character
counts were a better article size metric because they could be cheaply
determined by the reading agent. An alternative view was advanced by
Bill Wisner (et al) who suggested that line counts were easier to
comprehend than character counts.

Several people told me how to turn on the Lines computation in C News.
Thanks, but I had already Read The Fine Sources.

From all this I conclude that article size computation (in whatever
form) can be more efficiently determined by the reading agent. I will
modify the nn sources to implement this policy and will post the patches
to Kim Storm for possible inclusion in a future release.

cbp
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