unbatcher out of sync?

[Grant DeLorean]

em at dce.ie (Eamonn McManus) writes:

>henry at zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>>It means "something's wrong with your batch":  relaynews did not find a
>>"#! rnews nnnnn" line where one should have been.  Typically this means
>>garbling during preparation or transmission.  One notorious trouble spot
>>is that the batch format cannot tolerate transformations of newlines to
>>CR-LF pairs; the byte counts in the "#! rnews" lines must be spot-on.

>We had `unbatcher out of sync' problems at a site I was involved in, which
>was fed its news by mail from a VMS site (ugh).  The VMS mailer (PMDF) got
>confused when lines exceeded 256 characters, as References lines often do,
>and would make a total hash of the header when this happened.  As a result,
>the "#! rnews" count would always be off by a small amount for the affected
>article.  C News resyncs at the next "#! rnews" line, but if the count is
>too long for the actual article contents it will have missed the start of
>the article following the garbled one.

 The other way that relaynews can get out of sync is if there are two
or three spaces between "#! rnews" and the number. I know at least
ufgate's batcher does this (who cares, right?). The simple solution
to this one is to have relaynews look again to find the number with
the string length incremented by 1 (doing it again with the string length
2 longer than originally intended doesn't seem like a bad idea). 
-- 
 Grant DeLorean  (grant at bluemoon)    {n8emr|nstar}!bluemoon!grant