Re: External complaints about the deprecated Lines: header

Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> Tue, 05 January 2010 01:28 UTC

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From: Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>
To: Usefor WG <ietf-usefor@imc.org>
Subject: Re: External complaints about the deprecated Lines: header
In-Reply-To: <35D817A499104492B30A6C30C4B5210F@Iulius> ("Julien ÉLIE"'s message of "Mon, 4 Jan 2010 21:23:50 +0100")
Organization: The Eyrie
References: <AE9BD6405EEF488E92DC1A49755A0521@Iulius> <35D817A499104492B30A6C30C4B5210F@Iulius>
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Date: Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:27:11 -0800
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Julien ÉLIE <julien@trigofacile.com> writes:

> * 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).

Yeah, this has been a problem for years.  It's just becoming more
noticable now that new versions of INN don't generate the header, but some
servers haven't generated the header for quite some time and I see
supposedly 0-line articles all the time on old servers.

As you say, the only real solution is for people to upgrade their
software.  The Lines header was always rather broken.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>