🚀 go-pugleaf

In article  <20080513.1225.80506028snz$@i-m-t.demon.co.uk>
           v$af$ppint@i-m-t.demon.co.uk "ppint. at IMT" writes:

>         - hi; quiet round here, isn't it? [a] must be the excessi^W
>         unaccustomed heat and all those strange sunbeams [b] causing
>         dipspcers to doze off...

Indirectly -- I believe the heat simply makes the beer evaporate 
faster.  ;-)

>         - so, 'specially with your mental health in mind, and to
>         exercise your little gray cells, a problem i've managed to
>         create and inflict upon myself:

[snip description of batch-butchery and the results]

Initially I thought this might be a LF vs CR/LF problem (as Snews 
uses the *nix-like linefeed EOL character), but no.  Batch.txt 
uses standard rfc-whatever CR/LF as line delimiters, which get 
converted to LF for storage in the newsbase.

However, taking a fleeting look at the unbatch source (at least, 
the version I have here which might be different from the JLW 
one) it looks like there is a mechanism which checks the number 
of bytes in an article -- that is, the length of the file between 
successive "#! rnews <length>" entries.  I think it allows some 
leeway, 10 bytes or so, as a check that the "#! rnews.." isn't 
part of an article body <boggle> and if it fails this check it 
assumes that this is _not_ the start of a new article but a 
continuation of the present one.  Which is what I understand you 
are seeing.

So, the lesson learned is to excise articles _very_ carefully.  
If the article you're cutting has for example lots of spurious 
white space or blank lines (or rather the one before) you have to 
maintain that garbag^H^H^H^H^H^Hwhite space.

Oh -- and one more thing: the <number> after the "#! rnews" 
refers I believe to the length of the succeeding article, so when 
excising an article, make sure that you don't accidentally leave 
that "#! rnews" line instead of that of the next actual article.

Hope that makes sense (and that it is not a red herring...)

Pete

-- 
   "We have not inherited the earth from our ancestors,
    we have borrowed it from our descendants."