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From: greg@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Greg Noel)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin,comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: mailers (really connectivity data)
Message-ID: <1424@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Date: Sun, 8-Mar-87 17:07:35 EST
Article-I.D.: ncr-sd.1424
Posted: Sun Mar  8 17:07:35 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 9-Mar-87 04:17:22 EST
References: <2131@ncoast.UUCP> <554@hao.UCAR.EDU> <1113@ulowell.cs.ulowell.edu> <470@iscuva.UUCP> <683@xanth.UUCP>
Reply-To: greg@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Greg Noel)
Organization: NCR Corporation, Rancho Bernardo
Lines: 30
Xref: mnetor news.sysadmin:69 comp.mail.misc:112

In article <683@xanth.UUCP> john@xanth.UUCP (John Owens) writes:
>In article <470@iscuva.UUCP>, davids@iscuva.UUCP (David Schmidt) writes:
>> It would be nice if the map data could be distributed as patch files
>> between full distributions.  .....

>Sounds nice, but posting it as patch files would require that everyone
>always got all the parts.  .....

I have suggested to Peter Honeyman and the UUCP map folks that the next
version of pathalias allow an entry that forces a cost along a particular
link; i.e., instead of chosing the cheapest cost provided, a value is
assigned to the path.  This would allow the publishing of a "patch file"
that contained only the changed values, and there would be no need to
physically splice them into the current data maps.  For example, suppose
site foo used to talk to site bar, but no longer does.  The update file
would contain:
	foo	bar(=DEAD)
to indicate that the link from foo to bar is now DEAD, no matter what is
said elsewhere.

In this way, it wouldn't matter if you missed some of the updates; as long
as you had the latest one, you would be OK.  This same mechanism could be
used to distribute newly-created links, even before the official entry for
a site was distributed.  Then the full data base would be distributed on
a much longer cycle (quarterly? or perhaps ten percent of the data base
every week to spread out the volume?) with the update file being posted on
a much more frequent basis (weekly?  even daily is possible since the file
wouldn't be that large).
-- 
-- Greg Noel, NCR Rancho Bernardo     Greg.Noel@SanDiego.NCR.COM