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From: tale@turing.cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence)
Subject: Re: trn bugs
Message-ID: <9S&%XL#@rpi.edu>
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Computer Science, Troy NY
References: <1990Aug9.052017.2137@mlb.semi.harris.com>
	<1990Aug9.074726.2922@mlb.semi.harris.com>
	<1990Aug10.045538.11435@mlb.semi.harris.com> <347@stephsf.stephsf.com>
Date: 19 Aug 90 00:10:57 GMT
Lines: 33

   From: wengland@stephsf.stephsf.com (Bill England)

   The thread files suffix a .th onto the file corresponding to the
   newsgroup.  When a newsgroup has a name that is two long for the
   filesystem mthreads can not build a thread file for it.
   Example:  "sco.opendesktop"  I'm sure that there are others.

While this could be fixed on SYSV by consuming yet another inode per
group to put the threads file in a subdirectory of the group, or by
just not putting a ".th" extension on the thread file (which doesn't
quite work when you have, for example, comp.unix and
comp.unix.questions), you could work it now by letting trn keep its
databases in the spool directory of each group as a .threads file.
This is a configuration parameter.

Another possibility, and one that can save lots of inodes too, is just
to put it all in a flat filesystem.  It shouldn't be terribly
difficult to come up with a quick algorithm that could hash a news
group name into fourteen character names.  I'd even be willing to do
it if Wayne wants.

Kim Storm uses the flat filesystem approach for nn.  Well, almost
flat.  He has a GROUPS file in the database directory and a DATA
subdirectory which holds the group data in two seperate files for each
group.  The identifying portion of the file name is its line number,
zero based, in the GROUPS file.

Incidentally, in another article Mark Moraes, flat out said what I was
implying before (I know, why bother implying when you can say it flat
out) -- it would be really great if some sort of common database,
maintained by a single daemon, could be used for these newsreaders.
--
   (setq mail '("tale@cs.rpi.edu" "tale@ai.mit.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))