Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbatt!ucbvax!decwrl!reid
From: reid@decwrl.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: MAJOR bug in inews 2.11
Message-ID: <7980@decwrl.DEC.COM>
Date: Mon, 9-Feb-87 11:05:58 EST
Article-I.D.: decwrl.7980
Posted: Mon Feb  9 11:05:58 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 10-Feb-87 04:27:40 EST
References: <1252@hplabsc.UUCP>
Reply-To: reid@decwrl.UUCP (Brian Reid)
Organization: DEC Western Research
Lines: 34

In article <1252@hplabsc.UUCP> taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor) writes:
>Now that I've bashed my head into the wall for the past four hours
>trying to track this one down, it seems that the "-M" flag in the
>latest version of inews (2.11) is semi-worthless due to a bug.
>
>Specifically, if I hand it a "from" line that is in uucp notation
>rather than internet (e.g. hplabs!taylor instead of taylor@hplabs)
>it will ignore the '-M' and make the From: be the person invoking
>inews instead.  

This is a classic case of a camel being a horse designed by a committee. I
implemented the "-M" option under 2.10.2 and sent the code to Rick Adams. He
included it in 2.10.3 Beta and distributed that to the Beta sites. Mel
Pleasant needed some option to make news do funny things for internal Rutgers
reasons, so he modified my -M option code to do something random (I have
never fully understood what) when a Path was present. When I complained about
this he said "oh well, as long as you make sure there isn't any path present
in the article it will still work the way you want." I grumbled a lot, but
nothing ever came of it. 

A couple of weeks ago I explained this situation on the moderators mailing
list (which should include all of the people likely to use the -M option).
I'm sorry it didn't reach you--it would have saved you a lot of time.

Actually, there is a very good reason why you don't want a uucp-style from
line in a submitted news article, but inews should probably warn you about it
rather than fix it for you. The news distribution mechanism looks at the path
line to see who has seen an article and who hasn't. That's how it avoids
sending a message back to where it came from, thereby causing infinite loops.
But if you preload the path with a mail path from the submitter to the
moderator, then the article will never be sent to any of the hosts along that
path. Depending on the length of that path, this can be a serious problem.

Brian