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Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Ways to deal with the additional load...
Message-ID: <8994@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 26-Nov-87 11:29:04 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.8994
Posted: Thu Nov 26 11:29:04 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 26-Nov-87 11:29:04 EST
References: <3372@uunet.UU.NET> <1886@ho95e.ATT.COM>, <3376@hoptoad.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 28

> (Henry's C news batcher can do much better, cutting off an unresponsive
> site while still getting the news out to everybody else, but in typical
> C news fashion it changes the interface "just a little bit" so you can't
> conveniently drop it in as a B news batcher replacement...

Nonsense.  Utzoo ran for months using that batcher with an ancient B news.
The *only* adverse effect of this is to make batch-length limiting rather
imprecise.  It has absolutely no effect on the disk-space conservation code,
which is totally independent of it.

> ... I would make it meet the interface spec first and go for the small-is-
> bootiful ideology second.  And I will, before I install it here...)

If you install all of C news, it meets the interface spec just fine, since
C rnews is prepared to generate the extra information which the batcher
would like (note:  "would like", as opposed to "needs").  However, it works
just fine as is even with a B rnews feeding it.  Apart from "meeting the
interface spec" being slower, it tends to lead to an indigestible monolithic
mess that is relatively difficult to change and parameterize for new needs.
I know, I wrote a couple of them:  the C batcher as distributed was not
our first attempt.  "Small-is-bootiful" was not our only motive here.

Um, would it be too much to suggest that perhaps your time (which, if it's
anything like mine, is in short supply) is more usefully spent fixing things
that are really broken...?
-- 
Those who do not understand Unix are |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
condemned to reinvent it, poorly.    | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry