Re: Why does Gnus generates Lines: header in mail?

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net> writes:
> * Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>  on Sun, 29 Sep 2002

> | It shouldn't.  It should be using overview for that information.

> Overview is a feature of the NNTP client specifications.  Not all news
> readers use NNTP.

This is, for all intents and purposes, no longer true.

> For example, a reader looking at a local spool

Essentially no one does this any more.  There may be one or two people who
are doing this out of a sense of nostalgia, but using NNTP to localhost is
faster, more reliable, and offers considerably more features.  And you
have the ability to do that already if you have the news in the first
place, unless you're just faking a local spool using a suck utility (and
why you'd do that rather than just use an off-line reader, which does
basically the same thing but a lot more reliably and with better control,
escapes me).

It's utterly pointless to do try to use the local spool unless you're
doing it for the same reason that you'd be programming on a Commodore 64
or porting gcc to a PDP-11.  Even the hard-line old Unix clients are
starting to drop support for reading from a local spool.

Not to mention that roughly 10% of the Lines headers seen in the wild on
Usenet are completely wrong.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>