From: Bernie Cosell (bernie@fantasyfarm.com)
Date: Sat Aug 03 2002 - 18:13:16 CDT
On 3 Aug 2002, at 19:53, Erland Sommarskog wrote:
> "Bernie Cosell" <bernie@fantasyfarm.com> writes:
> > If news breaks with 2822 compatibility, I'm not sure what "two-in-one"
> > clients like Agent will do, *at*all*, much less whether those apps will
> > continue to be useable for moderation, since they'll have to have a LOT
> > of their internals changed...
>
> I don't know the internals of Agent, but I would surprised if this
> would be rocket science.
I didn't mean to imply 'rocket science'... just lots of changes and some
new internal machinery.
> Thus, Agent must be able to tell what is what already, to avoid their
> users making fools of themselves.
Actually, Agent does this now by the presence or absence of a
"Newsgroups" header. Since the message formats are identical for usenet
and email virtually *EVERYTHING* is handled identically [printing,
sorting, filing, exporting, importing, threading, displaying, etc]; no
special code, no tagging of particular messages... it is all just handled
"2822". The only differences arise because there are a *handful* of
things that are _ONLY_ legal for a usenet posting ['followup' might be
about the only one I can think of offhand; oh, and "Post new copy of
message" [which is what we moderators use], and both use *ONLY* the
presence or absence of a "newsgroups:" header [*parsed*via*2822*] to
determine if followup/post-new is to be legal or not. [I cannot think of
a thing that is legal for email-only and would not be permitted to a
usenet article, so the asymmtry right now is solely in the direction of
"there is a TINY bit of extra functionality for usenet articles" and
AFAIK, Agent does *NOT* carry around any information about whether a
particular message is email or news nor provides any special handling for
it, *other*than* in those one or two places that are news-only where it
uses 2822-parsing to look for a Newsgroups header [on the fly].
Once again, I don't mean to make this sound like it is going to be a
Rocket-Science programming job... I am only pointing out that the more I
think about it, the more places I can come up with where the the 2-in-1
clients will have to have disjoint program flow and to distinguish email
from usenet that is NOT current necessary. None of it is hard, but
there'll just be [IMO] a LOT Of nooks and crannies that'll have to be
attended to, which will both delay "new things" getting into the program
and also likely make previously-rock-solid clients [like Agent] have a
bunch of bugs and anomalies and infelicities for some time to come...
/Bernie\
--
Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers
mailto:bernie@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA
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