Xref: utzoo news.admin:14605 news.software.b:7925 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!uunet!mcsun!ukc!slxsys!ibmpcug!mantis!mathew From: mathew@mantis.co.uk (CNEWS MUST DIE!) Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b Subject: Re: Really funny jokes being missed Message-ID: Date: 22 May 91 12:49:54 GMT References: <1991May21.191538.15325@zoo.toronto.edu> Organization: Mantis Consultants, Cambridge. UK. Lines: 53 henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes: > In article mathew@mantis.co.uk (CNEWS MUST DIE!) > > > The losses, while regrettable, are necessary. > >Why is it "necessary" to drop articles with the date written as > > Date: Mon 20 May 91 15:46 GMT > >instead of > > Date: Mon, 20 May 91 15:46 GMT > >then? Enquiring minds want to know. > > Because general repair of botched headers is an impossibly hard problem, > and imperfect solutions are often cures worse than the disease. This > case would not have been hard to deal with... but there is *always* just > one more case that would be easy to deal with, and you have to draw the > line somewhere. Well, if you don't need to repair the header, don't bother. Just propogate the article. If some other piece of software does need to repair the header, it can do so itself. If you do need to repair the header, do your best. Message-ID: is unsalvageable, Path: is tricky, Newsgroups: is relatively easy, Date: is easy, and you don't need to know about anything else. So there's an excellent case for throwing away articles with malformed message-IDs, and a borderline case for throwing away articles with malformed paths. And that's all. > Actually, one of your ideas -- using news rather than mail to report the > problems -- is not totally naive. It has its own problems and we haven't > yet found a variant that is fully workable. (Trying to get everyone to > carry a new newsgroup is infeasible Why? Tell 'em if they don't carry it you'll drop their articles. That's your usual way to make people conform, isn't it? > and "control" is a fake newsgroup > with non-intuitive semantics.) Do you mean that there is some problem with getting control messages propagated? You could always make the C News reports look like cancel messages for nonexistent articles, or fool sites into propagating them in some other similar way. > Please *think* about your ideas, including how they might fail, before > posting them. Please *think* about your ideas, including how objectionable they might be, before foisting them off on Usenet. mathew