Re: External complaints about the deprecated Lines: header

Hi all,

> Ray, the administrator of news.eternal-september.org, is currently havi=
ng issues
> with his users; they complain about the fact that a news server is no l=
onger
> required to generate a Lines: header.

Reading the whole thread, the problem comes from the fact that:

 * some users use filters against the Lines: header;

Well, they should not.  Scoring should be done on the overview data (whic=
h is
for instance available with slrn).


 * some news readers use the Lines: header to show the number of lines;

It appears that newer versions of these readers use the overview data.
So upgrading usually solves the issue.


 * LOTS of news servers generate a wrong lines count in their overview.

This last issue is the most annoying.
Diablo, Highlands servers, INN (< 2.5), amongst others, return that an ar=
ticle
has 0 line in its overview data when no Lines: header is present.  It is =
the
implemented behaviour of XOVER.
That breaks things (especially filtering based on headers, before downloa=
ding
articles).

Note that INN 2.5 returns the real number of lines with XOVER (and of cou=
rse
OVER).


So the real problem comes from the NNTP protocol itself (with XOVER) and
not the article format.
I hope that impacted users will manage to solve their problem -- it is ha=
rder
when it is at the server side...

We can't do much for that, unfortunately.

--=20
Julien =C9LIE

=AB Les math=E9matiques peuvent =EAtre d=E9finies comme une science
  dans laquelle on ne sait jamais de quoi on parle, ni si ce qu'on dit
  est vrai. =BB (Bertrand Russell)=20