🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <+F7_3++@warwick.ac.uk>, cudep@warwick.ac.uk (Ian Dickinson) writes:
|> In article <HPN532w164w@mantis.co.uk> mathew@mantis.co.uk (Giving C News a *HUG*) writes:
|> >For example, if you are using rn and one of your users is in the habit of
|> >leaving out the spaces after the colons in a newsgroup header, then all his
|> >postings will be silently dropped, but your sample article will pass the
|> >test suite with no problems.
|> 
|> The issue here is user education and/or fixes to Pnews.

Since Pnews is a script, it is trivial to make the following simple modification
to it: instead of feeding the article to inews directly, it feeds it to a simple
checking/repair program instead.  This program checks all headers for validity,
and fixes up common errors that can be repaired (e.g. putting back the space
if someone says "Keywords:foo" in a header.  If a header cannot be repaired,
it returns a false status; if everything is valid after fixups, it feeds the
article to inews.

The code to do the checking can be taken directly from C news, since Henry
and Geoff have already taken the trouble to write it.  Fixing your Pnews
will then become a one-liner; just change the definition of the "inews" shell
variable to point to the new program.

For NNTP users, we can do even better: change the mini-inews program to do
the checks before talking to the NNTP server.  Then Pnews need not be changed
at all.

--
Joe Buck
jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu	 {uunet,ucbvax}!galileo.berkeley.edu!jbuck