🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <D0BGKF.2qr@telly.on.ca> evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) writes:
>What I've found is that a significant amount of incoming news batches are
>garbled. Brought over compressed, they won't uncompress cleanly; when it's
>forced, the first half of each batch looks fine, but as one goes further and
>further in the file it becomes more and more garbled until it's unreadable.

This really does sound like bit rot in transmission, rather than a news
problem.  Progressive deterioration is pretty much what you would expect
from occasional bit errors, since compress builds its dictionary as it
goes along.  And if compress itself is balking, that's not something that
news *could* do -- the problem's got to be somewhere in the transmission
path between compress and uncompress, which basically means the UUCP
software and the hardware. 

I'd suggest making sure by UUCPing some files back and forth a few times,
using the same paths and protocols employed for news, and seeing if they
make it intact.  Some experiments with more suspicious protocols, and
possibly encapsulations with checksums (such as the bencode/bdecode stuff
that ships with C News), would also seem in order.
-- 
Little minds have only room for thoughts           |       Henry Spencer
of bread and butter.       --Amundsen              |   henry@zoo.toronto.edu