Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!unisoft!gethen!farren
From: farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: MODERATED GROUP (soon) ...
Message-ID: <485@gethen.UUCP>
Date: 28 Dec 87 14:51:09 GMT
References: <375@spl1.UUCP> <5290@iuvax.UUCP> <6902@brl-smoke.ARPA> <482@gethen.UUCP> <6903@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Reply-To: farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren)
Organization: There's Unix there in Oakland
Lines: 40

In article <6903@brl-smoke.ARPA> w8sdz@brl.arpa (Keith B. Petersen (WSMR|towson) <w8sdz>) writes:
>One of the *most* frustrating things about Usenet is the frequent errors
>in newsgroup postings.  I can't understand why no one has addressed that
>problem.  I see large numbers of notes about truncated postings.  It's
>very likely that the very thing that saves money, the use of "compress"
>to handle net news, is the cause of this problem.  I REPEAT: THERE IS NO
>ERROR CHECKING IN COMPRESS/UNCOMPRESS.

I would suggest that you learn a little bit about what you are talking
about before you go talking about it.  While there is, indeed, no
error checking in compress, there really doesn't need to be.  There
IS error checking in every protocol I'm aware of which is used to send
the files from machine to machine.  The chances of an error cropping
up in file transmission is miniscule - the chances of an error happening
in decompressing a correctly-transmitted file are zero.  It isn't
'very likely' that compress is the problem - it is as close to certain
as makes no difference that it is NOT.  Much more likely is the fact
that articles are not passed from machine to machine unprocessed - 
each article is processed in some way by each site before it's sent
on to the next. (At least, in 99% of the cases - there are a very
few sites that just send them on and never touch them.)

The truncation problems are almost always due to the fact that
any article appearing on the Net has gone through any number of
systems, each of which may handle a file in a different way.  This is
particularly true if an article has passed through an inter-net
gateway before it has gotten to you, or if it has passed through one
of the many different mailer programs, each of which seems to have
its own set of peculiarities.  Often, as well, the original poster
turns out to be the one who screwed it up, without noticing.  After
all, HE didn't have to decode and decompress it!  If you're really
concerned about finding out how the truncation happened, trace the
article back to its source - somewhere in there, you'll find the
site that messed it up, and I'll bet you any amount that the culprit
won't be compress.

-- 
Michael J. Farren             | "INVESTIGATE your point of view, don't just 
{ucbvax, uunet, hoptoad}!     | dogmatize it!  Reflect on it and re-evaluate
        unisoft!gethen!farren | it.  You may want to change your mind someday."
gethen!farren@lll-winken.arpa |     Tom Reingold, from alt.flame