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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!munnari!kre
From: kre@munnari.OZ (Robert Elz)
Newsgroups: net.news.b
Subject: Re: more verification of Chuqui's article-eater bug, & a question
Message-ID: <906@munnari.OZ>
Date: Sat, 7-Sep-85 07:26:56 EDT
Article-I.D.: munnari.906
Posted: Sat Sep  7 07:26:56 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 9-Sep-85 01:04:57 EDT
References: <11414@Glacier.ARPA>
Organization: Comp Sci, Melbourne Uni, Australia
Lines: 40
Summary: I cannot repeat this problem, no matter how hard I try to force it

When I first saw Chuq's report of this "bug" I was a little
shocked, then I looked at the code, and came to the conclusion
that it couldn't happen (which someone else did also & reported
to the net).

Now Brian has had the same thing happen to him.  This gets
beyond mere co-incidence, thinks I, lets have a go at
forcing this bug to happen.

But no luck - I have tried the batching code from 2.10.1, 2.10.2,
and 2.10.3 - they all produce identical batches.  I have tried
unbatching with unbatch from all of those versions, again, all
I get is a lot of "duplicate article ignored" messages (because
I keep feeding rnews the same old set of articles over & over).

I even looked at mcvax's batching code that I know some people
use, and couldn't find anything wrong with that either.  (I know
that at least Chuq's problem wasn't with that one, because he
mentioned the #! rnews line, which doesn't exist with that version).

So - just what is happening here?  Chuq, Brian, which versions
of news are you running, what are the id's in your unbatch.c
files, and even more important, tell us about your news feed.
Where did the bad batches come from?  What version of the news
code, and what version of batch.c.  (Are you possibly both getting
news from some site that has broken the batching code locally?)
Is the news being just batched, or batched & compressed as well?
(ie: is the bug possibly in compress, rather than batch/unbatch).
If compress (or anything similar) is being used, which versions
at each end?

Can you send (mail) me a small piece of a batch that is bad.  Say
from the #! rnews that precedes the 0 length control article, down
to and including the header of the next article.

Its important that this problem be located, if only to set our
minds at rest that it is something local to the nsc / glacier / ...
area.

Robert Elz				seismo!munnari!kre