Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: cnews inbound batches going into in.coming/bad
Message-ID: <1990Sep27.171401.2268@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Sep24.180726.11442@nstar.uucp> <1990Sep25.151613.1979@zoo.toronto.edu> <1990Sep26.143619.21521@druid.uucp>
Date: Thu, 27 Sep 90 17:14:01 GMT

In article <1990Sep26.143619.21521@druid.uucp> darcy@druid.uucp (D'Arcy J.M. Cain) writes:
>Does this mean that if a batch has one duplicated article then the entire
>batch is thrown away? ...

No, they'll be processed just fine, but the *next* time you feed them in,
they will all be duplicates.

>... perhaps you mean that the article
>that caused the problem is marked as received and therefore is seen as a
>duplicate as well.  This would still mean that a redundant feed would have
>no chance to correct the error.

This is true.  However, it's a fundamental problem.  Short of comparing
the two copies byte-by-byte, there is no way to tell whether a second
copy might perhaps fix something that was wrong with the first... and
there is no automatic way (in general) to decide which is the fix and
which is the bug.  Attempting any of this is also very costly, and sites
with redundant feeds normally get 2+ copies of the exact same thing.
-- 
TCP/IP: handling tomorrow's loads today| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
OSI: handling yesterday's loads someday|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry