Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: C expire - deferring history rebuild
Message-ID: <1990Apr12.161152.7261@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <5377@helios.ee.lbl.gov>
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 90 16:11:52 GMT

In article <5377@helios.ee.lbl.gov> jef@ace.ee.lbl.gov (Jef Poskanzer) writes:
>Now, it seems like it would be pretty straightforward to modify this
>flag (or add a new flag) to do the dbm hacking on the existing history
>files.  This would leave history out of date with respect to history.pag
>and .dir.  But no one looks at history directly...

Actually, they do:  the dbm file is only an index into the history file.
And expire in particular works from the history file and ignores the old
dbm file.

However, in this case the dbm hacking is not necessary at all.  There is
not much point in deleting things from the dbm file without deleting
them from the history file, and not deleting things from the history
file just means that (a) expire takes a bit longer because it tries to
expire things that are already expired, and (b) the history file gets
larger.  Having old entries in the history file is otherwise harmless.
This probably ought to be documented better.

I looked at tinkering with the dbm files (etc) without doing a complete
rebuild, and basically decided it wasn't worth the trouble.

>Should we upgrade to a full C news system with the upcoming dbz support? ...

Well, yes, but for other reasons. :-)

>And what about Naomi?

She's still trying to figure out NNTP. :-) :-) :-)
-- 
With features like this,      |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
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