Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: parallel sys file entries in C News
Message-ID: <1990Aug28.172106.20512@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Aug28.123323.2598@robobar.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 28 Aug 90 17:21:06 GMT

In article <1990Aug28.123323.2598@robobar.co.uk> ronald@robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo) writes:
>	stl:scot/all,!local:f
>	stl/ibmpcug:all/all,!local:f
>The problem is that C News treats all sys file entries independently,
>so, e.g. a local article posted to scot.test would satisfy BOTH criteria
>and be entered TWICE in stl/togo.  B News only queues it once in this
>case, I'm told.

In this particular case, it's easy enough to fix with a ",!scot" in the
second line.  In general, it does seem a bit silly to add the same name
to the same file twice, but I'm not familiar with the code and can't say
what would be involved in doing something about this.  There is also the
question of whether interesting tricks can be played that *depend* on
the lines being independent...

>Would it cost too much to do a "remove the duplicates" pass once the
>"sites togo" list is generated ?  Or is there a better way to do this?

A "sort -u" would remove the duplicates, but it does not seem worth doing
as a standard thing, given that this situation rarely crops up and a sort
is not a particularly cheap operation.


On an unrelated topic, something we should perhaps address in documentation
is that there seems to be a popular myth that "!local" in the distribution
subfield has some kind of magic effect.  It doesn't.  Unless your local
articles actually contain "Distribution: local" lines, "!local" is quite
meaningless.
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