Path: utzoo!utstat!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!umich!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hoptoad!gnu
From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,fido.ufgate
Subject: Re: Line wrap?
Message-ID: <10183@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 12 Feb 90 05:30:20 GMT
References: <2933.25D60BEC@fidogate.FIDONET.ORG>
Organization: Grasshopper Group in San Francisco
Lines: 48

[This msg is posted both to a FidoNET echo and to a Usenet newsgroup.
Please follow up to whichever one is local to you.  I'll try to pass
any significant comments to the other side.   -- gnu@toad.com]

Robert.Wilhite@p99.f14.n376.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Robert Wilhite) wrote:
> Currently, mailout & newsout don't tamper with the extra-long lines
> found on Fidonet.  One of the recurring complaints I see on Usenet is
> that lines longer than 80 (or 72?) bytes get truncated, so many of the
> messages from Fidonet are severely mangled.

This is not the real problem, as far as I can tell.  The Usenet
transport software can transfer lines longer than 72 or 80 characters.
There are limits in some mailers [sendmail] that mess things up
slightly on lines longer than 256 characters, but those mailers are for
mail, not usenet news, so they usually don't come into play here.

What is probably more of a problem is that the Unix *news reader
programs* and *mail reader programs* don't handle long lines
particularly well.  They just tend to wrap them at the terminal width,
without regard to spaces.  The Fidonet reading programs wrap the lines
for your reading convenience, since on small machines it's hard to tell
how wide the screen will be (40, 64, or 80, or more).  As transported
around, there are only newlines at the ends of paragraphs.

There seems to be no particular easy solution.  You could make all
messages that go Fido->Usenet get their lines wrapped to some handy
width, but there are some messages that really should not be
reformatted -- source code, encoded binaries, and messages encrypted
for privacy come immediately to mind.  Ideally the news and mail
transport mechanisms should just move the bytes, without messing around
with them.  We already have the CR/LF problem though, so we are doing
some messing as it is -- but let's not make it worse.

> Any chance this will be addressed in a subsequent release of mailout &
> newsout?

Probably a better place to address this is in the Usenet news readers.
There is no good reason why they shouldn't be able to wrap lines
intelligently while showing you a message.  For once, let the Unix
side fix up their old software, rather than changing the Fido side...
that is, if we can get anyone to make the changes.  The Unix programs
are all free in source, so changing them is no problem.

And if there are any lingering problems in the Unix news transport code
with long lines, let's find them and fix them too.
-- 
John Gilmore      {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid}!hoptoad!gnu      gnu@toad.com
Just say *yes* to drugs.  If someone offers you a drug war, just say no.