Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: C News expire -p in use?
Message-ID: <1990Jul11.153230.16884@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Jul10.175636.15964@zoo.toronto.edu> <1990Jul10.235857.2352@mlb.semi.harris.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 90 15:32:30 GMT

In article <1990Jul10.235857.2352@mlb.semi.harris.com> del@thrush.mlb.semi.harris.com (Don Lewis) writes:
>>Does anybody but me make actual use of the -p option in C News expire? ...
>
>No, I never noticed it before.  It looks like it would be useful though...
>What else is available to perform this function if -p is removed?  

Something will be available to do it if -p goes away.  I'm not sure, yet,
of the details, but we and others do use the functionality.  (I've already
gotten several bits of mail saying "yes, we use it".)

The motive behind this, by the way, is twofold.  One is that -p has always
been kind of ugly, with one fixed set of contents and no way to change it
without digging around in the insides of a C program.  The other is that
with -p taking up stdout, statistics reports (which are due to be expanded
substantially) have to go to stderr, which is annoying because it would be
nice to reserve stderr for genuine errors.  Worse, there are other things
that might want to use stdout; expire is just plain short of convenient
file descriptors.
-- 
NFS is a wonderful advance:  a Unix    | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
filesystem with MSDOS semantics. :-(   |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry