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From: jerry@olivey.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Passing on unwanted groups
Message-ID: <49289@olivea.atc.olivetti.com>
Date: 16 Aug 90 18:24:57 GMT
References: <1990Aug15.164651.26664@zoo.toronto.edu> <49281@olivea.atc.olivetti.com> <1990Aug16.163107.1166@zoo.toronto.edu>
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In article <1990Aug16.163107.1166@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>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.

Yea, but the stressed out sysadmin is probably going to run the expire
or rebuild as root.  If he is running C news then the ownerships will
be wrong and stress will turn to panic.  The damn tools should at least
abort if they are not being run as the news owner.

Your idea about just adding missing articles to the history file sounds
very appealing.  I feel it would be a useful tool.

One could process the history file into a bunch of sorted file names and
compare that against a scan of the spool directory.  (Sed, sort, find,
and comm, that could all be done in a shell script!) Then one only needs
a mini rnews that will add a history line for each of the missing
articles without trying to recreate them in the spool area or forward
them to neighbors.  Presumably the date on the file should be used as
the date of reception.

The only remaining question is the order of the history file.
Traditionally it has been kept in cronological order and the B news
rebuild goes to the extra overhead of sorting it into that order.  Is
there any real reason one can't just append to the end?

				Jerry Aguirre