Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Passing on unwanted groups
Message-ID: <1990Aug17.155959.1331@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Aug15.164651.26664@zoo.toronto.edu> <49281@olivea.atc.olivetti.com> <1990Aug16.163107.1166@zoo.toronto.edu> <49289@olivea.atc.olivetti.com>
Date: Fri, 17 Aug 90 15:59:59 GMT

In article <49289@olivea.atc.olivetti.com> jerry@olivey.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre) writes:
>... 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.

How?  It is not easy to tell.  In particular, it is *very* difficult to
reliably determine the login name or user id from the shell in a portable
way.  (Look at all the hassles inews goes through to try to find the login
name if you don't believe me.)

There is also a difference between deliberately confronting people with
unfamiliar conventions, and expecting them to remember familiar ones
("the files belong to whoever you were when you created them").

>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?

NNTP, in particular, really wants to see the file in chronological order.
I consider it a bug that C News doesn't do that on a rebuild, and plan
to fix it.
-- 
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