From: Brad Templeton (brad@templetons.com)
Date: Mon Jul 02 2001 - 12:58:14 CDT
On Mon, Jul 02, 2001 at 02:09:59PM +0100, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
> Brad Templeton said:
> >> - agents MUST NOT prevent the use of message/partial just because the
> >> whole message or a given piece would be under some limit;
> > I'm confused. Why would anybody care if a message was under a limit?
> I don't know. But I don't want it to happen.
Well, let me modify that by saying that while systems have no reason to care
about small messages, users do care if a message that should have been
one part is posted as 24 parts (especially today with uuencode since the
"standard" there is 24 unthreaded parts with part numbers in the subject
line.)
We probably should include a line that any multi-article article (We need
a vocabulary here) SHOULD be posted as a single thread (not just message/partial
but we won't name uuencode by name) so that people can rightly complain
about unthreaded multi-article articles.
> But a general-purpose newsreader would need this facility anyway, so why
> would it be limited to reassembling mpegs ? I know groups that post their
> FAQs in parts for their own reasons - I'd much rather these were
> message/partial than have to reassemble by hand, and I don't want them
> dropped just because the author splits them in 50kb chunks.
But with a decent article size minimum (say 5MB) a general newsreader doesn't
have to worry about article reassembly, and by and large they don't today,
nor should they have to. The typical size systems can handle will probably
increase in line with what people want to post.