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From: chip@chinacat.Lonestar.ORG (Chip Rosenthal)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Pnews causes inews to reject .signatures
Message-ID: <881@chinacat.Lonestar.ORG>
Date: 13 Feb 90 02:51:01 GMT
References: <4331@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> <FL8!2=@rpi.edu> <2126@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <1990Feb12.202553.12619@hayes.fai.alaska.edu>
Organization: Unicom Systems Development, Austin (yay!)
Lines: 39

wisner@hayes.fai.alaska.edu (Bill Wisner) writes:
>If you want to insert a Reply-To: header so that mail gets directed to the
>right place, that's just dandy. But why, WHY, should the news software
>automatically generate a Reply-To: header that is *identical* to the From:

My gripes about the old (patchlevel 40) headers were:

    (1) Reply-To: was useless.  It just duplicated From: and there wasn't
        an easy way of configuring it otherwise.  Bill, remember when you
        were messing with rn on killer years back and I wanted a Pnews
        hack so that my messages would have Reply-To's to my vector
        address?  Well...you still owe that :-)

    (2) Pnews shouldn't provide blank Sender:, Expires:, or References:
        fields.  The only one of these which should be entered by a hoomun
        bean is Expires:.  And if you don't know how to put one in yourself,
        you shouldn't be screwing around with it.

The XENIX portability patches I mentioned here a couple of days ago also
include some bug fixes.  Pnews is effected.  Specifically, I did the
following:

    (1) The "From:" line, which was added in the post-40 patches is no
	longer there.  This will fix the problem with inews not appending
	signatures.

    (2) The "Reply-To:" is reinstated, but only if you've got a REPLYTO
	environment parameter defined.  Otherwise, it doesn't appear.

    (3) The "Sender:", "Expires:" and "References:" blank lines have been
	removed.

On the other hand, maybe this omitting the .signature thing isn't such
a bad deal...

-- 
Chip Rosenthal                            |  Yes, you're a happy man and you're
chip@chinacat.Lonestar.ORG                |  a lucky man, but are you a smart
Unicom Systems Development, 512-482-8260  |  man?  -David Bromberg