makehistory quirk

[greg andruk]

On Tue, 7 Dec 1999, Katsuhiro Kondou wrote:

> Makehistory just creates overview data whose format is
> specified with overview.fmt.  And Bytes header is not
> appended by innd, although overview data created within
> innd includes the info of Bytes header.

Right.  There is no Nytes: header, and even if an article contains a
header named Bytes: it should be ignored for the purpose of generating
overview information.  That is, the Bytes: pseudoheader is only an
implementation detail of INN's overview system; the reference
implementation of NOV always uses fstat() to create the field.

[The purpose of the byte count field is to cure the problems inherent in
the old Lines: header; it cannot be trusted to be accurate, and even when
it is accurate it tells little about the article's actual size.]

Further, of the required NOV fields [subject, from, data, msgid,
references, byte count and line count], the reference implementation only
allows references and line count to be empty.

> To have it into overview data, it's quite easy.  Just call SMnext()
> with RETR_ALL instead of RETR_HEAD, and get the size of article.  But
> I'm doubtful whether we should include it, even if the article does
> not.

Okay, so it sounds like there is no overwhelming performace consideration 
to this one.  I will try to make some time to do a patch then.  It should
be in there.

For the curious, the reference implementation of NOV can be obtained from
<URL:ftp://ftp.std.com/src/news/nov.dist.tar.gz>