'rn' isn't marking cross-posts (was 'Too much cross-posting?')

[Chris Lewis]

In article <698 at whizz.uucp> bbh at whizz.UUCP (Bud Hovell) writes:

Hi Bud!

>No - the SAME ARTICLE appears in full in, say, unix-pc.whatever, then later
>aortuars AGAIN in full in, say, comp.sys.att. And, yes, the Xrefs line has the
>site name in it, and news was compiled with DOXREFS. Everything else seems to
>function fine.

If you only have the site name in the Xrefs: line, then News' (B-news right?)
DOXREFS mechanism isn't working.  It's supposed to look like:

	Xrefs: yoursitename newsgroup:number newsgroup:number ....

It's been a while since I "Configure"'d rn, but I believe that rn *can*
choose to disable recognizing/interpreting Xrefs lines.  A reconfigure
is definately warranted.

What version of news are you running?  More than one of the versions
(or patch levels) of B-news was busted w.r.t. Xrefs.

A little history may be in order - when rn first appeared, Larry felt
that he had to implement some sort of Xrefs facility into news articles
so that rn could avoid seeing the same article again. I think that he
originally supplied the patches for news, but ultimately this got
folded into Rick Adam's distributions of news.  However, at least one
of the versions/patches since then broke it.  There was quite a bit
of argument about it at the time, for there are other ways to figure
this out - readnews does something along the lines of remembering the
inode number (I think - don't quote me, it's been a LOOONGGG time
since I played with 2.10.1 and readnews).

Some caveats to keep in mind:
    - Xrefs works approximately this way - when you "n" or "j" or whatever
      an article, ALL of the "newsgroup:number" lines are, in effect, merged 
      into the .newsrc entries.  Thus, you shouldn't see any of the xrefs again.

    - However, if you mark an xref'd article "unread" (eg: "M") in one 
      group, and then go thru the other group it's in, you'll see it again.

      Which is a bit of a pain.  I sort of wish that if you mark a
      xref'd group "unread", that it cancels all other occurances in
      the xref anyways.  Insignificant bitch about a pretty spectacular 
      program.

    - Xref's are *not* remembered across rn sessions.

    - Xrefs won't work if the sitename is wrong.  Eg: might be
      some other site's Xref line that came in by mistake, and the
      newsgroup:number fields would be totally wrong.

      One thing that might trip up some machines is whether the site
      name has more than 6 characters - news and rn may be getting
      different ideas as to what the site name is.  Maybe domains
      could screw this up sometimes.

    - Xrefs won't work if the Newsgroups: line doesn't have any commas
      in it.  (I've been noticing the occasional *known* cross-posting
      appearing with only one newsgroup in the Newsgroups: line.
      This appears to be *someone* stripping newsgroups from the
      Newsgroups: line if somewhere along the routing, one of the
      sites doesn't receive some of the newsgroups - this is VERY BAD
      BEHAVIOUR - but I can't pin it down yet, even so, this has
      no bearing on what we're talking about because it wouldn't be
      cross-posted on your machine anyhow...)
-- 
Chris Lewis, R.H. Lathwell & Associates: Elegant Communications Inc.
UUCP: {uunet!mnetor, utcsri!utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis
Phone: (416)-595-5425