Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!crdgw1!uunet!mcsun!ukc!slxsys!ibmpcug!mantis!mathew From: mathew@mantis.co.uk (CNEWS MUST DIE!) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: CNEWS MUST DIE! Message-ID: Date: 20 May 91 15:43:03 GMT References: <1991May18.041319.29490@zoo.toronto.edu> Organization: Mantis Consultants, Cambridge. UK. Lines: 43 henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes: > In article mathew@mantis.co.uk (CNEWS MUST DIE!) w > >The old C News delivered all the articles it could. The new one throws lots > >away unnecessarily. In what way is that a "performance improvement"? > > As I said before: fewer screams from your victims. The old C News did > indeed deliver all the articles it could, including a good many that > caused cardiac arrest or twitching convulsions in other news systems. If a system falls over because of errors in its input, then that system should be fixed. C News should not Nanny it. > After a certain amount of jumping up and down by the proprietors of > such systems -- including, as I recall, UUNET -- we somewhat reluctantly > decided that being good citizens of the network required tightening up > standards conformance somewhat. Right. It is entirely correct that *C News* should allow posting only of conformant articles. It is *not* correct to make it throw away non-conforming articles posted from other systems, especially if it does not tell them about it. > (There are limits to how far we can be > moved by those screams. In particular, if it's a legal RFC1036 article > causing the problems, our attitude tends to be "gee, that's too bad, > why don't you fix your software?".) I'll say it again. If *any* program falls over unsafely as a result of *any* sort of bad input, then that program is *faulty* and should be fixed. Yes, even if you're doing something mindbogglingly stupid like piping binary bitmap files into relaynews, it should still fail gracefully. If the input to relaynews is *really* unparseable (lacking *essential* information and containing *uncorrectable* errors) then it is reasonable to drop the input. The sorts of errors C News drops articles for are neither uncorrectable, nor are they errors which cause the article to lack essential information. mathew