Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!hobbes.physics.uiowa.edu!ns-mx!uunet!coplex!disk!corpane!herman
From: herman@corpane.uucp (Harry Herman)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: automatically mailing warnings about dropped news to originators
Message-ID: <1991Jun16.154834.114@corpane.uucp>
Date: 16 Jun 91 15:48:34 GMT
References: <28465C57.4853@tct.com> <1991Jun1.212941.1352@shaman.com> <4805.284df498@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com> <34587746@bfmny0.BFM.COM> <1991Jun10.225052.19739@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: Corpane Industries Inc.
Lines: 45

In <1991Jun10.225052.19739@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:

>In article <34587746@bfmny0.BFM.COM> tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes:
>>... An unparsable date (which
>>might something as innocuous as a new time zone) does not intrinsically
>>cripple the article, as a bad Message-ID does for instance....

>Unfortunately, it does, because it might be a garbled version of a stale
>date.  A parsable date is a non-negotiable requirement.  (Incidentally,
>a new timezone abbreviation does not make the date unparsable, if I'm
>remembering the code correctly.)
>-- 
>"We're thinking about upgrading from    | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
>SunOS 4.1.1 to SunOS 3.5."              |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry

Since dates are important, then have C-News recogonize the date formats
that really exist on the net, not according to what a piece of paper says
they should look like.

Work with the writers of other news systems to get them to write new code
to match that piece of paper.  Then, when 99.9% of the news postings
match the peice of paper, then CONSIDER dropping the "obsolete" support.
Although it would not really be obsolete until there are 0 posts with the
old format.

One of the recent releases of the nn news reader claims to have changed its
code that splits digests into separate articles to handle both the "standard"
format, and a particular news group's "non-standard" digest format.  The
writer of nn did not say "Group x's digests are incorrect so we will
ignore it", the writer essentially said "we will support what is actually
out there".

I am a user of news, I am not a system administrator or a news administrator,
so I have zero choice in what operating system we use or what news transport,
and am highly offended at an earlier posting that was along the lines of
use Unix and C-News if you want to use news.  There are other operating
systems out there, and there are other news transports out there.  If we
are truly going to have an international network for sharing information,
then all the people writing the software that makes this happen have to
decide to work together and work with what is out there.  Add new features,
but don't break existing features with a we are right and the rest of
the world is wrong attitude.

				Harry Herman
				herman@corpane