Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: UUNET Funds C News Development
Message-ID: <1991May1.231210.4687@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: Wed, 1 May 1991 23:12:10 GMT
References: <131119@uunet.UU.NET> <1991May1.205754.7384@solbourne.com> <6MA+RMH@cs.widener.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <6MA+RMH@cs.widener.edu> brendan@cs.widener.edu (Brendan Kehoe) writes:
> Because a lot of the shell scripts are *never* modified. I rewrote a
>few of them (anne.jones, tear, and spacefor) in C, and the speed
>increase and reduction in load on the system's markedly clear...

The load on the system from anne.jones and tear shouldn't be significant
unless you're using inews for gatewaying (generally not a great idea);
they get invoked only for local postings.  They *are* slow enough to be
annoying if you're desperately anxious to get your words of wisdom out
onto the net this very minute, but patience is a virtue...

Spacefor, on the other hand, is a difficult case.  Basically it deserves
to be in C for performance reasons, but there *isn't* a C interface for
determining free disk space on a lot of old systems.  Unfortunately, not
only is a df/awk approach slow, but df output format turns out to be far
more variable than we thought.  Current plans, partly implemented, are
to provide a C version of the guts of it (keeping the parameter settings
in a shell file makes sense, so you don't want to convert *all* of it)
for those with suitably modern systems, while retaining the df-based one
for old systems.

> I can't wait to see if inews gets turned into C. :)

Again, it will not be rewritten entirely in C, because much of it is not
performance-critical and does contain imbedded policy decisions.  However,
a re-partitioning of functions and a *partial* C rewrite is in order, and
has been on the "to do" list for quite some time.
-- 
And the bean-counter replied,           | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
"beans are more important".             |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry