Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!leah!rpi!crdgw1!steinmetz!algol!welty
From: welty@algol.steinmetz (richard welty)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: List of sites with broken Followup (No References) Software
Message-ID: <13788@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 10 May 89 22:32:52 GMT
References: <3222@looking.UUCP> <29126@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Sender: news@steinmetz.ge.com
Reply-To: welty@algol.crd.ge.com (richard welty)
Organization: New York State Institute for Sebastian Cabot Studies
Lines: 43

In article <29126@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> jwl@ernie.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (James Wilbur Lewis) writes:
*Rather than people manually inserting a "re:" in the subject lines of
*articles which are really basenotes, it is possible that they are
*deleting the References: lines of followups, in order to avoid the
*dreaded "interp buffer overflow" from rn.  

*If this is really what is going on, I suggest one of the following
*patches to the software:  (1) modify rn to allow arbitrarily long
*Reference: lines, or truncate them automatically when they get
*unwieldy, or (2) only keep a reference to the article's immediate
*parent, since the remainder of the current References: line could
*be reconstructed from that.

the symbolics newsreader (which will be released as soon as i
find some time to fix the remaining known bugs) implements this
with a variable that allows the user to specify how many references
be retained.  if the variable is nil, then behaviour is the same
as rn (except that lisp machines don't do "interp buffer overflow".)
this seems to me to be a very reasonable solution; i'm currently
defaulting this variable to 4.  if you need earlier ones, you can
look up the articles whose article-ids are available.

*Another explanation might be in your counting program -- what does it do
*for malformed reference lines?  Many people incorrectly do a global
*replacement of ">" for some alternate character, to defeat the
*inews 50% included-text rule.  This messes up References: lines,
*which, while marginally less annoying than extraneous "inews fodder",
*is still a bother.  

basically, i think it is unreasonable to expect references: lines
be well-formed; i am planning on putting some hypertext like
stuff with article-ids in a future version of the symbolics newsreader,
and had already thought about this.  when they're well-formed, i'll
use 'em, otherwise i'll ignore them.  i don't think that any more
can reasonably be done -- we all know how hard it is to fix the other
guy's software.

richard
-- 
richard welty               welty@algol.crd.ge.com
518-387-6346, GE R&D, K1-5C39, Niskayuna, New York
    ``Every time I see an Alfa Romeo pass by,
         I raise my hat'' -- Henry Ford