Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!epimass!jbuck
From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: List of sites with broken Followup (No References) Software
Message-ID: <3190@epimass.EPI.COM>
Date: 15 May 89 15:14:18 GMT
References: <3222@looking.UUCP> <29126@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <3229@looking.UUCP>
Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 54

In article <3229@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes:
>Many people have responded to tell me the reasons for bad References lines.

>Gateways of mailing lists & moderated groups can be tolerated to a degree,
>because they limit the problem to a single group.  Other problems can't
>be tolerated.  If that means shutting off mail->news gateways, that's what
>it means.

Brad, have you gotten any feedback from the "notes" gang?  After all, notes
relies on the References: lines quite heavily at the news-notes gateway
sites to convert into the internal structures they use.  They seem to survive
quite well, and I don't hear them screaming for the news-notes gateways
to be shut down.

Obviously the "notes" system cannot exist, and all plans for it must be
scrapped. :-)

>So I think we may have to do the following:
>
>	a) No mail->news gateways.  You wanna post, get some posting
>	   software on your machine.  It's only fair if you're going to
>	   post to 10,000 machines.

Sorry, won't happen.

>	b) Otherwise get some very smart gateway software that can figure
>	   out a references line

A slight modification to the existing "recnews" program can help.  Recognize
the "In-Reply-To" header, and see if a message-ID-like object appears on
the line, use it to generate a reference header.

>	c) Posting software should detect when the References line has been
>	   edited out of a posting, and re-insert a shortened line that at
>	   least includes the ultimate parent (original article) and the
>	   immediate parent.

There isn't a way to do that.  There isn't enough information present.

>	d) Non-unix sites running new software must be required to adhere to
>	   the standard.

It doesn't have anything to do with Unix or non-Unix.

>Or give up.  Which would be sad.

Or simply design any system with enough robustness to cope with the
inevitable errors that people will make and garbage that will be sent
as input.



-- 
-- Joe Buck	jbuck@epimass.epi.com, uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck