Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Reliable news batches, anyone?
Message-ID: <1989Mar20.190304.23059@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <4387@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu>
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 89 19:03:04 GMT

In article <4387@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu> flee@shire.cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) writes:
>How about a news batch format that doesn't depend on something as
>system-dependent as character count?  If a news batch is sent over a
>link that truncates long lines (like Path: or References:), then part
>of the #!rnews line for the next article gets eaten...
>... And sending a batch over a mail link that
>changes '\n' to CR-LF, you have to compensate for an extra character
>each line.

If your transmission path does not give you byte-for-byte fidelity,
regardless of line lengths etc., what you need is some sort of encoding
scheme to get the data through intact.  Fault-tolerance in the batch
format is only a band-aid -- the articles are getting mangled!  The
right solution is to do whatever is necessary (uuencode, btoa, etc.)
to get the data through intact.  Once you have done that, the unbatcher
resync problem disappears.
-- 
Welcome to Mars!  Your         |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
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