Re: GNKSA and Gnus

[Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk>]

[ Lars:  I'd be willing to work on 10d and 10e if you are interested. ]

The GNKSA requirements seem reasonable to me.  Some of the SHOULD
doesn't really apply to Gnus because of special concerns, which I
suspect is why they are SHOULD and not MUST.

>     7c   Does not restrict references sensibly

I often have to manually edit the references line when posting
followups in gnu.misc.discuss in order to make INN accept it.  I guess
it happens in gnu.misc.discuss because

1) The threads there are very deep.
2) There are a high fraction of Gnus users, thus none of the posters
   software will restrict the header.

This is with 

nntp-server-type's value is 
"200 ssv2.dina.kvl.dk InterNetNews NNRP server INN 1.5.1 17-Dec-1996 ready (posting ok).\n"

I found this in the config file.

##  Maximum size of a single header.
#### =()<MAXHEADERSIZE          @<MAXHEADERSIZE>@>()=
MAXHEADERSIZE           1024

I would feel more safe having Gnus truncate the header, than doing it myself.

> Additionally, the software violates the `soft' GNKSA requirements
> (SHOULDs) in the following way:
>     10d  Does not omit (proper) signatures from quoted text

I think Gnus should do that.  The default Gnus citation handler is too
barebone, probably in reaction too the alternative citation handler
(SuperCite) which is too advanced.

>     10e  Does not let the user indicate which part to followup to

This is something Gravity does, and in general a good idea.  It migth
make less sense for Gnus.  However, I think it would be nice if
quoting would be restricted to the currently region in the messsage
being quoted, iff `transient-message-mode' is on, and the region is
active.

>     10g  Attribution line lacks Message-ID of original article

This is the only point I disagree with.  The message-id is in the
references line, which should be enough.  I don't think therte is
anything resembling a consensus on whether it should be included in
the attribution line as well.

>     16b  Does not refuse posting an empty article
>     16d  Does not refuse to post quoted text only
>     16f  Does not try to prevent posting multiple copies entirely

Actually, I believe I have gotten warnings for all three of these.

> The software sports the following nice net-keeping features unmentioned
> by the GNKSA:

Command to fetch FAQ for the group.