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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!seismo!ut-sally!smoot
From: smoot@ut-sally.UUCP (Smoot Carl-Mitchell)
Newsgroups: net.news.sa
Subject: Re: speaking of moving news
Message-ID: <745@ut-sally.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 9-Jan-84 11:32:35 EST
Article-I.D.: ut-sally.745
Posted: Mon Jan  9 11:32:35 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 10-Jan-84 02:14:39 EST
References: <118@onyx.UUCP> <3001@utcsrgv.UUCP>, <227@kobold.UUCP> <602@dciem.UUCP>
Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
Lines: 20

All sites running Berkeley Unix can, of course, just use symbolic
links to move "/usr/spool/news" without changing the news software at all.
We moved news here to a separate disk, mainly to balance the i/o load
without any problems.  Symbolic links have proven to be a very useful
tool for this kind of activity.  

One of my pet peeves about a lot of software (and news is no exception)
is the "hardwiring" of paths into the source.  At the very least
the files the software uses should be modifiable in the Makefile without
having to muck around with the actual sources.  Personally I like the
way sendmail (the standard mail router from Berkeley) configures itself.  
All filenames used by sendmail are put in a human readable configuration 
file.  The only filename the program needs to know is the name of the 
configuration file and it can be set via an argument, if need be.  If news 
was written in this manner then you would only have to change the name of 
the news spool directory in the configuration file to actually move the
news articles to a separate file system.
-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell, CS Dept. University of Texas at Austin
{seismo, ctvax, ihnp4, kpno}!ut-sally!smoot, smoot@ut-sally.{ARPA, UUCP}