Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Passing on unwanted groups
Message-ID: <1990Aug16.163107.1166@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Aug14.181327.16145@eci386.uucp> <101429@uunet.UU.NET> <1990Aug15.164651.26664@zoo.toronto.edu> <49281@olivea.atc.olivetti.com>
Date: Thu, 16 Aug 90 16:31:07 GMT

In article <49281@olivea.atc.olivetti.com> jerry@olivey.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre) writes:
>>... 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.
>
>If the history file is so mangled that it is useless to recover expired
>IDs from then there is this marvelous and powerful tool called "rm".

Unfortunately, there is also a Unix tradition that "rm" isn't necessary,
rebuilding something overwrites the old version automatically.  I worry
about naive sysadmins being tripped up by a non-traditional user interface
in a time of stress.  Emergency tools are the last place you want to get
creative or minimalist about user interface.

I may try to do something more elegant about the whole business, actually,
for another reason.  The costly part of a history-file rebuild is reading
all those articles to get newsgroups and message-IDs.  If you only want to
pick up a few missing ones, that is incredibly wasteful:  there is no need
to re-read any article that is already in the history file.  The pick-up-
missing-articles operation would be much more efficient if it didn't start
from scratch.
-- 
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