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Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi
From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d,news.misc
Subject: Making UUCP maps work better
Message-ID: <1251@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 10-Oct-87 12:21:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: bsu-cs.1251
Posted: Sat Oct 10 12:21:25 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 12-Oct-87 06:45:40 EDT
Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Followup-To: news.misc
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana
Lines: 37
Summary: was Re: arbitron program (v2.4.2--last updated 4 June 1987)
Xref: mnetor comp.sources.d:1356 news.misc:1006

In article <2713@xanth.UUCP> in comp.sources.d kyle@xanth.UUCP (Kyle 
Jones) writes, as an aside,
>p.s. I feel the same way about the the USENET maps.  Once every six
>     months would be often enough, since new or changed map entries
>     can be posted to news.config or news.newsite .

I have this wonderful idea of how to simultaneously achieve
contradictory things, namely: (a) decrease UUCP map traffic and 
(b) keep the map postings more current.

o    Every four months, a full set of maps is posted.  
o    Every two weeks, the maps are posted without any of the lines 
     beginning with #, i.e., with only the routing data.  A trivial
     shell script will strip these lines out, and the maps decease in
     size by a factor of 3 to 5.  (We could also just retain the one
     line that identifies date of revision.) 
o    And finally, every 4 days, a set of context diffs are posted for
     these stripped-out maps.

Or some similar multilevel scheme optimized for greatest currency,
least UUCP traffic, and greatest convenience to those who (let's face
it) work quite hard to keep the maps up-to-date.

Perhaps the people concerned could also add another feature to
pathalias to make it work better with frequently-updated map
databases:  a new switch -S which means "supersede".  Then, given
parameters such as

    pathalias [ud].* -S Newmaps/[ud].*

pathalias would make all information found in files after the -S switch
supersede corresponding information found before the -S switch.  Thus
you could add new map entries to the Newmaps directory, and you would
not have to search through the complete maps and delete the superseded
entries.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi