Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!world!geoff
From: geoff@world.std.com (Geoff Collyer)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: CNews - now a pedantic software! : -(
Message-ID: <1991Apr4.231602.17306@world.std.com>
Date: 4 Apr 91 23:16:02 GMT
References: <27F63B37.CFD@tct.com>
	<1991Apr02.183535.13886@buster.stafford.tx.us>
	<1991Apr03.042907.16938@buster.stafford.tx.us>
	<1991Apr04.221130.19697@comp.vuw.ac.nz>
Organization: Software Tool & Die Netnews Research Center
Lines: 29

Duncan McEwan:
>Unless there is a real technical reason why you shouldn't accept an
>illegal header, why do you want to reject it?
...
>But a missing space after a ":" shouldn't cause anyone major problems
>(If someone can point out to me a reason why it does cause problems, then
>I will most likely change my mind :-)

It shouldn't cause problems, but it does.  B News (in conformance with
RFC 1036) insists upon the space after the colon; if it's absent, B News
will complain "Inbound news is garbled!" (as I recall) and drop the
article (and the batch? it's been a long time).  So articles lacking
spaces after colons have been getting dropped by B News sites anyway.

One compelling argument for making C News drop such articles too was that
large B News sites (e.g. uunet) were getting the same illegal articles
over and over from their C News neighbours, and these articles were
causing at least a lot of complaints to the news administrator from the
news system and possibly loss of other news in the same batch too (I
don't remember the details; perhaps someone from an afflicted site can
comment).  Since the articles are illegal to start with, it seems
harmless to drop them immediately rather than letting them go on and then
be dropped by the B News sites.

Our usual disclaimer: relaynews just passes the bytes; it doesn't attempt
to repair broken articles.  If the article is broken enough to cause
trouble to the rest of Usenet, relaynews just logs it and drops it.
-- 
Geoff Collyer		world.std.com!geoff, uunet.uu.net!geoff