Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!wri!dragonfly.wri.com!ben
From: ben@wri.com (Ben Cox)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Bad batches in Cnews
Message-ID: <ben.674762886@dragonfly.wri.com>
Date: 20 May 91 18:08:06 GMT
References: <1991May15.200740.8051@wri.com> <1991May16.154238.29029@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: Wolfram Research, Inc.
Lines: 26

I wrote:
>>I keep getting bad batches in Cnews which, when re-run (mv
>>/usr/spool/news/in.coming/bad/* /usr/spool/news/in.coming) usually run just
>>fine.  "errlog" is always empty.

Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.toronto.edu> wrote:
>How old is your C News?  Modern ones are generally fairly careful about
>errlog, but some old ones didn't flush stdio buffers in some situations.

I checked the source, and they do flush the buffers.

From relaynews(8):

     If relaynews cannot establish safe standard file descriptors
     and  standardise  its  environment  (notably PATH, SHELL and
     IFS), probably due to failure of  malloc(3),  it  will  exit
     with status of 1 and without writing any complaints on stan-
     dard error (errlog), as a security precaution.

Well, this appears to be what's happening.  /usr/lib/news/log is fine, but
/usr/lib/news/errlog is empty.  Why would malloc(3) fail in some instances
but not in others?  Hand-examination of the "bad" batches reveals no
anomalies.

-- Ben
   ben@wri.com