Re: External complaints about the deprecated Lines: header

[Julien ÉLIE <julien@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

> Ray, the administrator of news.eternal-september.org, is currently having issues
> with his users; they complain about the fact that a news server is no longer
> 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 (which 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 article
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 downloading
articles).

Note that INN 2.5 returns the real number of lines with XOVER (and of course
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 harder
when it is at the server side...

We can't do much for that, unfortunately.

--
Julien ÉLIE

« Les mathématiques peuvent être définies comme une science
 dans laquelle on ne sait jamais de quoi on parle, ni si ce qu'on dit
 est vrai. » (Bertrand Russell)