Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!ukma!david From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- Resident E-mail Hack) Newsgroups: news.misc Subject: Re: Messages with >80-character lines Message-ID: <7541@e.ms.uky.edu> Date: Tue, 20-Oct-87 15:34:24 EDT Article-I.D.: e.7541 Posted: Tue Oct 20 15:34:24 1987 Date-Received: Wed, 21-Oct-87 23:12:01 EDT References: <7523@g.ms.uky.edu> <21314@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <7526@g.ms.uky.edu> <4756@oberon.USC.EDU> Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- Resident E-mail Hack) Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences Lines: 104 In article <4756@oberon.USC.EDU> blarson@skat.usc.edu (Bob Larson) writes: >In article <7526@g.ms.uky.edu> david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- Resident E-mail Hack) writes: >>yes, I did exactly that for a long time with a news feed we had >>BUT ... compress and atob/btoa don't run on the IBM 308x that's >>out other neighbor on BITNET. >Who said it had to be compress and btoa? compress/btoa happen to be what I used since it worked with a couple of the sites I wanted to exchange news with. It could be something else. >>Some of us (you included) are trying to free this network from its' [ I am speaking to Erik here ... ] >>reliance on Unix. Building the WorldNet and such like. But what will >>the IBM people on BITNET think if they start seeing every article come >>in with 2000 character long lines because someone on a Unix machine >>wanted "automatic formatting" of his paragraphs? They'll only be able >>to read the first 80 (132?) characters of each paragraph. >So who's forcing them to truncate???? BITNET itself is doing the truncation. Think that IBM only makes high speed CARD PUNCHs and BITNET begins to make sense. > Why can't they set up some >continuation line convention? To be honest, I don't think they really see the problem. Also there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. There are news readers and transport agents for IBM mainframes... But the use isn't very widespread. And the people doing it don't really understand that tab preservation or { and } preservation are needed things. Also ... most of the equivalent sort of traffic gets handled by their LISTSERVers. It's a distributed mailing list handler which allows people to subscribe/unsubscribe by themselves, and automagically subscribes them to the nearest LISTSERV. I don't really see a good solution. Potentially they could be a valuable addition to this WorldNet thingie we're trying to build. Doing things which are against their operating systems' assumptions is as irritating to them as their doing things against our os's assumptions. > A possible example would be to put a \ >in column 80 to indicate that the next line is really part of the >current line. Bad example. Suppose a Makefile is posted which has a line exactly 80 characters long with a \ as the last character ... I just remembered there's already one format in use that could be used ... The Listserv-punch format ... it can at least handle long records virtually within an 80 column punch file. And there's software around to encode/decode it already ... I'll have to look into this ... I think their current software works sort-of like ours. A batch arrives, gets put into a /usr/spool/news equivalent, and is transmitted from there. In order to not transmit the munged copy of the article across the net they'd have to do a non-trivial re-working of their systems to achieve an effect which won't even be visible to themselves. >While we're talking about fixing the news problems caused by bitnet, >could they standardize an ascii <-> ebcdic conversion table for this >use and make sure that tabs don't get converted to spaces? (The >conversion breaks patch files, sendmail.cf files, etc.) For my part ... I've determined that the only munging (at least for the news software at psuvm.bitnet) happens for articles which go: psuvax1 -> psuvm.bitnet -> ukma (i.e. were transmitted by UREP) For our feeds to the outside world I block any articles which arrived here via psuvax1 ... The only disaster I know of from a munged article which went through these links was one of the patches-for-patch. Its' tabs were changed to spaces causing it to be useless unless you used the -l switch, but many people didn't know about -l. (It so happened that sdcsvax -> burdvax -> psuvax1 -> ukma -> cbosgd was VERY VERY fast that day). I think we all understand the problems. Personally I don't like the idea of using VERY VERY long lines anyway. It looks ugly and like the person doesn't know how to use their editor very well. Many people have pointed out that you look for paragraph breaks by blank lines. Yah, I use blank lines for paragraph breaks, but not all do. For another case, what will happen to the above quotations if they get automatically-formatted on display? Won't they stop looking like quotations? -- <---- David Herron, Local E-Mail Hack, david@ms.uky.edu, david@ms.uky.csnet <---- {rutgers,uunet,cbosgd}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET <---- I thought that time was this neat invention that kept everything <---- from happening at once. Why doesn't this work in practice?