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From: coolidge@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: B/C News woes
Message-ID: <1989Nov24.062333.4784@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 24 Nov 89 06:23:33 GMT
References: <1989Nov17.162448.22026@relay.nswc.navy.mil> <1989Nov21.140935.1224@relay.nswc.navy.mil> <256A4010.5066@rpi.edu> <1989Nov22.075837.12240@utstat.uucp> <89Nov22.130142est.2899@neat.cs.toronto.edu> <1989Nov23.192922.4202@utzoo.uucp>
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henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>Frankly, we don't see a good technical justification for the split between
>NEWSCTL and NEWSARTS.  They are logically both part of the news database
>on your system.  (There *is* a good reason for the NEWSCTL/NEWSBIN split,
>since it is not uncommon to have binaries shared among several machines,
>or possibly even different sets of binaries accessing the same database.)
>However, there are compelling compatibility reasons for the split, i.e. we
>don't want to fix all the newsreaders that know about "/usr/lib/news" and
>"/usr/spool/news", and not all systems have symbolic links.

One reason, perhaps spurious (but it's a problem for me, for other
reasons), is because of things like
	cd $NEWSARTS
	find .
(or find $NEWSARTS) that get used in a few places (most noticably
mkhistory). Perhaps $NEWSCTL wouldn't break this, but other things
do. For instance, I keep nn's database in /usr/spool/news/nn, since
it's easier to export it around that way. I may move it to
/usr/local/lib/news/nn, since /usr/local/lib/news is now its own
partition, but for the moment it's in $NEWSARTS --- and that
breaks mkhistory, since a lot of the nn files start with numbers.
My solution was to just explicitly list all top-level categories
in mkhistory --- ugly, but it fixes the problem. In.coming and
out.going cause the same problem --- they're in the same file
system as all of the articles (perhaps these can be moved (?) ---
I haven't looked the configuration stuff recently).

--John

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John L. Coolidge     Internet:coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP:uiucdcs!coolidge
Of course I don't speak for the U of I (or anyone else except myself)
Copyright 1989 John L. Coolidge. Copying allowed if (and only if) attributed.
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