Path: utzoo!mnetor!motto!ecijmm!ecicrl!eci386!clewis
From: clewis@eci386.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: A few questions/comments on Rkive
Keywords: long rkive archive sources USENET
Message-ID: <1989Jul7.022708.4826@eci386.uucp>
Date: 7 Jul 89 02:27:08 GMT
References: <1123@ssp15.idca.tds.philips.nl> <520@ssbell.UUCP>
Reply-To: clewis@eci386.UUCP (Chris Lewis)
Organization: R. H. Lathwell Associates: Elegant Communications, Inc.
Lines: 41

I've just started up rkive and like it.  Thanks.
But I do have a few preliminary comments - one already touched on:

In article <520@ssbell.UUCP> kent@ssbell.UUCP (Kent Landfield) writes:
>In article <1123@ssp15.idca.tds.philips.nl> jos@idca.tds.PHILIPS.nl (Jos Vos) writes:

>>-  Is it not possible to use rkive as a program directly
>>   from the sys file (that is, with the article as stdin)?
>>   Probably not (the first problem SHOULD be solved then).

>No. rkive is meant to run from cron and not receive the articles from stdin.
>To be quite honest, I never really thought about doing it that way but
>if I ... :-) :-) Currently, that is not in the works.

Actually, what might be better (from the point of view of trying to
collect lots of articles before bothering the MAIL: people) is to parse
a batch file.  For example, I have the following (C-news) sys file entry:

    maps:comp.mail.maps/all:f:

Which places the file name of each article in comp.mail.maps, and I
have a cron entry that runs a script that pulls each file name out
and unpacks it, calls pathalias and sends mail to me.  [I'm sending
it off to comp.sources.misc tonight]

This allows you to schedule when rkive runs, and it isn't dependent
on expiration (much).  Receiving on stdin could be rather unpleasant
w.r.t. performance at times....

The other main deficiency that I discovered so far is that you try
*so* hard to ensure that the .cf file is correct, that you don't allow
some additional niceties.  For example, each entry in "MAIL:" is
verified by calls to getpwnam().  That means that all three entries
will fail validation:

	MAIL: eci386!clewis, clewis@eci386, alias-in-global-alias-file
-- 
Chris Lewis, R.H. Lathwell & Associates: Elegant Communications Inc.
UUCP: {uunet!mnetor, utcsri!utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis
Phone: (416)-595-5425