Subject: another "robustness" request

From: Rick Troth <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 May 1993 18:02:46 -0500 (CDT)

Hi, 
 
	I've been moving notebooks from one system to another 
and find that sometimes the  blank line  after the header 
isn't  *really*  empty,  there's a single <SPACE> character. 
Developers,  if you would,  please cause Pine to treat a line 
with only white-space  (any mixture of SPACEs and TABs, 
but nothing else)  to be a valid header delimiter line. 
 
	Thanks! 
 
-- 
Rick Troth <[email-masked]>, Rice University, Information Systems

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 May 1993 17:36:10 -0700 (PDT)

> but nothing else)  to be a valid header delimiter line.

This is not a good idea.

A header line with only white-space has a specific meaning in RFC-822.  It is
a continuation line with empty text.  I have seen messages which deliberately
do this (e.g. in the Comments: header).  Such messages conform to RFC-822.  A
non-null header delimiter line does not.

In effect, you are asking that a bug be introduced in Pine to work around a
bug in some other software.  The proper thing to do is to fix that other
software.

If it weren't for the fact that this had negative consequences, it might be
considered as a robustness feature.  But, to be considered as a robustness
feature, a proposed function can not break something that is already valid.