Xref: utzoo news.admin:15085 news.software.b:8197 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!spool.mu.edu!agate!forney.berkeley.edu!jbuck From: jbuck@forney.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck) Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b Subject: Re: Possible solution to C news dropping articles? Message-ID: <1991Jun10.182410.2731@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 10 Jun 91 18:24:10 GMT Article-I.D.: agate.1991Jun10.182410.2731 References: <1024@fnx.UUCP> <+F7_3++@warwick.ac.uk> Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Reply-To: jbuck@forney.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck) Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 29 In article <+F7_3++@warwick.ac.uk>, cudep@warwick.ac.uk (Ian Dickinson) writes: |> In article mathew@mantis.co.uk (Giving C News a *HUG*) writes: |> >For example, if you are using rn and one of your users is in the habit of |> >leaving out the spaces after the colons in a newsgroup header, then all his |> >postings will be silently dropped, but your sample article will pass the |> >test suite with no problems. |> |> The issue here is user education and/or fixes to Pnews. Since Pnews is a script, it is trivial to make the following simple modification to it: instead of feeding the article to inews directly, it feeds it to a simple checking/repair program instead. This program checks all headers for validity, and fixes up common errors that can be repaired (e.g. putting back the space if someone says "Keywords:foo" in a header. If a header cannot be repaired, it returns a false status; if everything is valid after fixups, it feeds the article to inews. The code to do the checking can be taken directly from C news, since Henry and Geoff have already taken the trouble to write it. Fixing your Pnews will then become a one-liner; just change the definition of the "inews" shell variable to point to the new program. For NNTP users, we can do even better: change the mini-inews program to do the checks before talking to the NNTP server. Then Pnews need not be changed at all. -- Joe Buck jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu {uunet,ucbvax}!galileo.berkeley.edu!jbuck