Re: [Pan-devel] AW is rejecting some postings when the "Newsgroups:" line becomes word-wrapped also. (Re: Bug with long header lines)

[Duncan]

SciFi posted on Tue, 31 Dec 2013 22:20:44 +0000 as excerpted:


> I need to bump this problem up to current master/head at 6daf184 please.
> 
> AstraWeb is flat-out rejecting some postings I make, when the
> "Newsgroups:" header line becomes word-wrapped, too.
> As recorded by Pan in its Event Log,
> AW is sending-back this:
> 
>> 441 Header does not conform to RFC1036
> 
> I opened a problem ticket with AW's techs on a similar/related case.
> There, we finally understood that AW has a limit of number-of-groups on
> this line.
> They won't accept more than 3 groups here.
> 
> Now, we _are_ limiting a crosspost to 3 groups here.  But Pan can
> _still_ word-wrap this line, when including three _long_ group-names
> that make Pan kick-in this strange word-wrap bug.
> And so AW (still) won't accept the post.
> 
> I must use another NNTP client, in my case I use Unison (from Panic.com)
> since I have a paid license for it,
> to post my simple message with the same 3 crossposted "Newsgroups:"
> line.
> 
> I don't think I can 'make' AW fix this.
> We need Pan to prevent _any_ word-wrapping in the headers, period
> (safest)
> [I believe we do have up to 1K characters
>  per header-line here, don't we?].
> Or, we need Pan to make sure there is _some_ text on the right-hand-side
> of the colon ':', then word-wrap at a later place on that 'first line',
> thus creating 'proper' longer header-lines when needed.
> See?

[Hopefully this shows up.  At one point I had problems posting to the dev 
list/group and had to use user, but I never tracked down the problem 
there.  At least pan has a sent folder now, from which I can dig it out 
and send manually to the list via mail, bypassing gmane, if I need to...]

This is very possibly the same gmime bug as the references header bug 
seen earlier.  What version of gmime are you running?

It was fixed for the references header for gmime 2.6.19, but not for 
other headers, as most headers have a less strict line folding algorithm 
in the RFCs.

As for not wrapping at all, no, that's not going to work either, 
especially for headers.  The RFCs have a MUST wrap at 1000 characters 
(998 plus terminating CRLF), but a SHOULD wrap at 80 chars (78 plus 
CRLF).  The SHOULD is there for a reason (besides visuals) -- some poorly 
compliant clients can't deal with more.

See the threads on user and the gmime bugs for upstream gnome and 
downstream distro gentoo (and other distros, that's just mine) bugs on 
the references header:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=709031

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=486776

If that's what it looks like, then test-reverting to gmime 2.6.15 or 
earlier should fix it, and you may be able to create a patch to test 
later versions based on the one for the references header as applied for 
2.6.19 (or see the gentoo bug for the patch I applied to 2.6.18, 
basically the same thing but without the changelog chunk since of course 
it didn't apply to .18).

Assuming the results of those tests demonstrate that it is indeed a gmime 
bug, I'd suggest opening a new bug with gnome, using bugzilla's clone-bug 
feature to clone mine as a starting point, thus making it easier to 
follow the trail.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman