[ntp:questions] A Suggestion For Abolishing the Leap Second

Per Hedeland per at hedeland.org
Fri Jun 8 06:23:03 UTC 2007


In article <slrnf6hji7.bql.kostecke at stasis.kostecke.net> Steve Kostecke
<kostecke at ntp.isc.org> writes:
>On 2007-06-07, Per Hedeland <per at hedeland.org> wrote:
>
>> Quadibloc <jsavard at ecn.ab.ca> writes:
>>
>>>I don't know why it isn't part of your reply, or why you didn't see
>>>it.
>>
>> Probably brokenness in the news->mail gateway (Danny uses the mailing
>> list).
>
>The gateway does what it was designed to do.
>
>In this case we've encountered something that was not accounted for in
>the software design.

You can call it what you want, I'll call it a bug if it doesn't handle
arbitrary plain text. But it's a common mistake, which can in most cases
be blamed on the non-obvious and not particularly useful default
behaviour of sendmail when receiving a message on *stdin*.

>> You seem to frequently have a lone dot as the first line of
>> your text in followups - nothing wrong with that, but maybe not much
>> value either...
>
>A lone '.' on a line is the SMTP end of message marker. It has to be
>escaped (by doubling it up) if it is to be ignored.

And of course the requirement for this doubling is part of the SMTP spec
- but per above I guess that the problem wasn't in SMTP, or else you
have (had) a really badly broken SMTP client. (And just to be nit-picky,
SMTP requires that any *leading* dot is doubled, not just a lone one.)

>If my signature is attached to this article we are now escaping the lone
>dot correctly.
>.

I can't personally verify it since I don't use the mailing list, but I
knew you'd fix it.:-) Thanks!

--Per Hedeland
per at hedeland.org




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