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From: lwall@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Suggestion: article number 0
Message-ID: <2094@sdcrdcf.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 21-Jun-85 20:19:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdcrdcf.2094
Posted: Fri Jun 21 20:19:19 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 24-Jun-85 03:48:58 EDT
References: <905@sdcsla.UUCP>
Reply-To: lwall@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Larry Wall)
Organization: System Development Corp. R+D, Santa Monica
Lines: 14
Summary: 

It would take a certain amount of work do make rn treat article 0 as the
"newsgroup charter", for several reasons.  Article number 0 tends to get
used as a conventional value indicating no article number at all.  Reserving
article 1 instead of article 0 would help that.  There are also difficulties
with keeping a bit in the "has-this-article-been-read" bitmap for an article
with a number less than the minimum stored in the active file.  There are
heuristics for keeping the length of .newsrc lines down by scanning the
directory for unexpired articles, and these might need to be taught about
article 0 or 1.

It's a pretty good idea, but the patch isn't trivial.

Larry Wall
{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,sdcsvax}!sdcrdcf!lwall