Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Comments on C news
Message-ID: <1989Jun22.174603.10483@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <2228@vicom.COM> <1989Jun20.211939.7835@utzoo.uucp> <2277@vicom.COM>
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 89 17:46:03 GMT

In article <2277@vicom.COM> lmb@vicom.COM (Larry Blair) writes:
>=Efficiency is always an issue for us.  There are provisions for running it
>=immediately, although "build" doesn't know about them.
>
>I'd like a combination of both.  Would an rews.immed with "newspool -i &"
>work?  Actually, how about a daemon that stats the news spool directory
>every minute?

Uh, why?  Either you run newsrun periodically, or you ask newsspool to run
it every time a batch comes in.  Or both.  I don't see the utility of the
"&", which will foul up trouble reporting.  And I don't see any point to
checking every minute, which can in any case be achieved by running newsrun
frequently.

>I appreciate the need to avoid the humongous log that B news produces, but
>you left out some very important things.  Unless you save the path some
>duplicate articles, there is no way to tell where they are coming from.

Do remember that duplicate articles are normal in some situations; for
example, Toronto deliberately has redundant feeds, which means duplicates,
in quantity, are to be expected.  The log does report which neighbor they
came from; our experience is that information back beyond that is seldom
useful (and it's very bulky).

>... if the batch were directly to relaynews without spooling in
>this case (assuming that spool/uucp and spool/news are on different
>filesystems), the uucp free space would increase and the news wouldn't
>be lost...

I don't understand -- if there is adequate free space in spool/news,
incoming articles will not get rejected anyway.  If there isn't, then
there is nothing that can be done about it.  The borderline cases,
where spool/uucp and spool/news are on the *same* filesystem and the
space freed up by the uucp files is just enough for the articles to be
filed (unlikely, they are usually bulkier once unbatched), frankly seem
to me to come under the heading of brinkmanship.  I repeat, the space
checks are meant as disaster mitigation, not to routinely let you run
safely with disks on the brink of overflow.
-- 
NASA is to spaceflight as the  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
US government is to freedom.   | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu