Path: utzoo!yunexus!spectrix!clewis
From: clewis@spectrix.UUCP (Chris Lewis (It's loose again!))
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: News header compliance...
Keywords: Headers RFC B-news
Message-ID: <674@spectrix.UUCP>
Date: 22 Jun 88 19:36:15 GMT
Article-I.D.: spectrix.674
Organization: Spectrix Microsystems Inc., Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Lines: 59

I've been having our B News (2.11 patch 14) hang occasionally while trying
to parse batched news - goes into some sort of loop when it decides
that an article is garbled.  I'm still trying to fix the hang problem
(the "#!rnews" piping business appears to hang in the write),
but I've noticed that this usually comes from an article from utcsri
(often from one of the upcoming events articles).  

This is part of an article:

>#! rnews 6703
>Newsgroups: ut.na
>Path: tmsoft!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!csri.toronto.edu!krj
>From: krj@csri.toronto.edu (Ken Jackson)
>Subject: NA Digest   Volume 88 : Issue 24
>Message-ID: <8806201610.AA16854@gerrard.csri.toronto.edu>
>Organization: University of Toronto, CSRI
>Distribution: ut
>Date:	Mon, 20 Jun 88 10:50:36 EDT
>
... rest of article deleted ...

The article is considered garbled in this case because B-news was
unable to parse out the date.  Please look at the date shown above - after
the ":" there's a tab instead of a space.  Bnews does the parse by
means of a heavily optimized macro/function combination that effectively
does this:

	if (strncmp(artline, "Date: ", strlen("Date: ")) == 0) ...
				   ^--- space

Obviously, it'll fail and will always be considered garbled by B-news.

I've sent off a copy of this mail item to some of the local SA's
(including Henry Spencer who hasn't replied yet).

B-news doesn't appear to like tabs, but C-news (according to some of
the local C-newsing SA's, eg: Dave Mason at tmsoft, or Rayan at utai) 
does accept tabs and that this is supposedly legal according to the 
USENET RFC's (of which I don't presently have a copy).  However, the 
"standards.mn" document (that comes with 2.11) says:

	A message consists of several header lines, followed by a blank line,
	followed by the body of the message.  The header lines consist of a
	keyword, a colon, a blank, and some additional information.  This is a
	subset of the ARPANET standard, simplified to allow simpler software to
	handle it.

What do we do now?  Should B-news be hacked to accept tabs here?  It's
very easy to do.  However, as more people convert to C-news (What
does B-news 3.0 do?) this will represent a bigger and bigger problem to
people who can't or won't upgrade past their current B-news.

Comments?

Thanks,
-- 
Chris Lewis, Spectrix Microsystems Inc, Phone: (416)-474-1955
UUCP: {uunet!mnetor, utcsri!utzoo, lsuc, yunexus}!spectrix!clewis
Moderator of the Ferret Mailing List (ferret-list,ferret-request@spectrix)