Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!lll-crg!hoptoad!gnu
From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: net.news.b
Subject: Why aren't we fixing these bugs instead of staving off the inevitable?
Message-ID: <1258@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Tue, 4-Nov-86 05:02:32 EST
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.1258
Posted: Tue Nov  4 05:02:32 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 4-Nov-86 10:31:23 EST
References: <3397@sdcrdcf.UUCP>
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco
Lines: 21

I've seen a bunch of messages in the last few weeks, all about how
various limits in the news software (inews, rnews, rn, ...) are breaking.
The posted fixes all seem to be of the "remove blown fuse, insert penny"
variety.

Have none of the news maintainers heard of "malloc"???

C news has been doing this right from the start -- for example, on the
active file, it stat's the file, mallocs the right amount of space,
then reads the whole file into memory in one read.  Very fast and there
are no magic constants to tweak next time the net grows.  If there's
more stuff in the active file than will fit in RAM, you have problems,
but this is also true of the "penny" fixes.

It just seems like common sense to me...
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa
terrorist, cryptography, DES, drugs, cipher, secret, decode, NSA, CIA, NRO.
 The above is food for the NSA line eater.  Add it to your .signature and
 you too can help overflow the NSA's ability to scan all traffic going in or
 out of the USA looking for "significant" words.  (This is not a joke, sadly.)