Pynchon archive temporarily unavailable

[Andrew Dinn]

Foax,

Sorry to have to announce this without any accompanying good news re a
fix or workaround but anyway the bad news is that my pynchon archive
has been snookered thanks to our web server having moved. The scripts
which generate the web pages rely on a standard program which, like
most standards, seems to vary quite widely from machine to machine.
Unfortunately, the new home for our web pages has a version which
cannot cope with the pynchon-l mail format. So, whenever you try to
read an archive folder which has a badly formatted mail note (i.e. any
archive folder) you get an empty page. I will endeavour to fix this in
the next week or so but if not then it's no archive until I get back
in January.

If you want the details (this is just in case anyone knows a fix) it's
as follows:

The new server is a DEC box running Unix and the offending program is
DEC's implementation of awk which throws up on lines with more than 99
tokens. Presumably the program only has buffering for up to 100
arguments. It only requires one poster to use a crappy editor which
formats with a <LF> at the end of a paragraph rather than at line end
to pollute an archive folder and it appears that all folders have at
least one such note. If there is any way of forcing DEC's awk to use a
larger buffer for its arguments please let me know.

Meantime, - a sudden and less than happy brainwave - I may have to
resort to passing the archive folders through a filter to wrap lines
of more than 80 characters. Yeeurgh. That's a lot of folders.


Andrew Dinn
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And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
To the rushing water speak:  I am.