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Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu!karl
From: karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.config
Subject: Re: Solution to news dup site names
Message-ID: <20491@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 22 Aug 88 18:27:49 GMT
References: <1445@datapg.MN.ORG> <20246@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <1474@datapg.MN.ORG> <645@mailrus.cc.umich.edu>
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In-reply-to: emv@mailrus.cc.umich.edu's message of 20 Aug 88 05:09:50 GMT

emv@mailrus.cc.umich.edu writes:
   True enough.  Long path names are a problem.

Not in terms of the software.  I just grep'd the Path: header out of
971 articles in comp.unix.wizards and stuffed them through `wc.'  The
result is an average Path: length of a fraction over 80 chars/line.
That's including the "Path: " text, so make it 74 chars/line of actual
hostname-and-!'s.  Allowing for deeply `leafed' nodes might knock that
average length up to, say, 120.

In the news software, src/header.h defines the max length as char
path[PATHLEN], where src/defs.h contains
	#define PATHLEN 512     /* length of longest source string */
and thus we could quadruple or quintuple the length of a Path: header
before breaking software.

If the metric is intead "longer than the text of the article," then
the much larger problem is that every news article carries around 8 or
10 lines worth of stuff to keep track of a 2-line comment.  Longer
Path: lines are not significant in the face of all those other
headers.

--Karl