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From: matt@ncr-sd.UUCP (Matt Costello)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Is the history file really needed anymore?
Message-ID: <1307@ncr-sd.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 15-Jan-87 20:29:58 EST
Article-I.D.: ncr-sd.1307
Posted: Thu Jan 15 20:29:58 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 16-Jan-87 04:10:13 EST
References: <5504@ukma.ms.uky.csnet>
Reply-To: matt@ncr-sd.UUCP (0000-Matt Costello)
Organization: NCR Corporation, San Diego
Lines: 25

In article <5504@ukma.ms.uky.csnet> david@ukma.ms.uky.csnet (David Herron, NPR Lover) writes:
>I got to thinking the other morning and decided we're close to not
>needing to have the history file any more.
>
>My idea was to have a master directory in which the file names are
>the article-i.d. (minus the '<' and '>').  here are the pro's and
>con's I considered at the time.

How about having a separate history file for every newsgroup, located in
the newsgroup directory with a name of ".history"?  For those articles
residing in multiple newsgroups, the first newgroup on the Newsgroups
header line would be used.  Its advantanges would be:

1.  This would cut down the size of each history file so that searching
    the history file would be fast.

2.  It is simple to understand and implement.

3.  It would allow expire to be run with different values in different
    newsgroups.  (It has always struck me as pretty silly that net.jokes
    survives the same length of time as mod.sources.)

-- 
Matt Costello, matt.costello@SanDiego.NCR.COM (registered w/ CSNET)
	{sdcsvax,cbatt,dcdwest,nosc.ARPA,ihnp4}!ncr-sd!matt