Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!rutgers!mtune!codas!cpsc6a!rtech!bobm
From: bobm@rtech.UUCP (Bob McQueer)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: possible vn bug?
Message-ID: <1504@rtech.UUCP>
Date: 26 Dec 87 20:55:04 GMT
References: <33360@soliloquy.uucp>
Sender: news@rtech.UUCP
Distribution: na
Lines: 40

This bug was much-discussed after surfacing about a year ago.  The fix was
immediately inserted into the sources I keep.  The stuff I recently issued
in alt.sources is the first "official" reissue since then.  It should not
display this particular bug (I just rechecked the sources to make sure, and
found buf[0] == '\n', not index(buf,':') == NULL, as well as a check to
prevent the divide by zero in the instance of there being no "Lines" line).

Murphy's law has struck, though.  I was happily running my new version for
months before posting it, and discovered a bug similar to this after posting,
although this one really shouldn't show up as much.  A badly scrozzled article
which has no "From", "Path" or "Reply-to" line will make it die when you try
to read the article.  I'll post a fix once I get other feedback from the
new posting.  It will only bite people curious enough to try to read articles
displayed with titles like "? ? ~ ?" because vn couldn't find a subject line,
etc., like me.  Here, at least, we haven't been getting such articles
regularly.  The one I saw was a great novelty.  The article in question had
obviously been truncated, so that the NNTP server thought the first few lines
of text were headers, followed by the last paragraph or so of the article.

BTW, I might as well solicit an opinion.  I've been changing vn to use NNTP,
and came across a little wrinkle that ties in with recent discussion.  In the
non-NNTP version, it posts followups by handing off to "inews", and letting
inews create a "From" line, which gets to be the user.  I found that if I
hand off to the NNTP'ed version of inews without a "From" line, it winds up
being from "News System", or some such thing.  I've got a configuration
ifdef in there now, to control whether:

	1 - a "From:" line is created, and placed in the user's edit file
		along with the other header lines.  Convenient, but it
		could be viewed as encouraging userid forgery.  That's how
		I have ours configured, and my "From:" line is sitting at
		the top of this very file.  I refrained from editting it.

	2 - a "From:" line is prepended to the user's stuff, thereby making
		any "From:" line the user inserted futile.

There could obviously also be a technique 2a of prepending only if the user
hasn't inserted one, which would require a bit more work.  Question:  Should
it be configurable in the first place?  If so, which should be the default?
If not, which should simply be the way things are done?
{amdahl, sun, mtxinu, hoptoad, cpsc6a}!rtech!bobm