Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Passing on unwanted groups
Message-ID: <1990Aug15.164651.26664@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Aug7.143458.1770@sci.ccny.cuny.edu> <747@sci34hub.UUCP> <1990Aug14.181327.16145@eci386.uucp> <101429@uunet.UU.NET>
Date: Wed, 15 Aug 90 16:46:51 GMT

In article <101429@uunet.UU.NET> rick@uunet.UU.NET (Rick Adams) writes:
>	... If you do an "expire -r" (rebuild
>	database), expire doesn't look at the history file at all, and
>	any articles no longer there have their history entries discarded...
>
>Bnews has saved old history when rebuilding since patch 15.

C News, in fact, doesn't.  I am debating changing this, but it's not
entirely obvious that it's a good thing.  The trouble is that there are
two situations in which one wants to rebuild history:  to pick up articles
thought to be missing (the degenerate case of this is when you have no
history file at all!), and to recover after the history file gets horribly
mangled somehow.  In the former case you want to save old history; in the
latter you don't.  It is probably necessary to distinguish the two cases.
-- 
It is not possible to both understand  | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
and appreciate Intel CPUs. -D.Wolfskill|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry