Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!rochester!cornell!uw-beaver!fluke!ssc-vax!cxsea!blm
From: blm@cxsea.UUCP (Brian Matthews)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Map expiration dates
Message-ID: <2326@cxsea.UUCP>
Date: 12 Jan 88 19:49:37 GMT
References: <2323@cxsea.UUCP> <7815@rutgers.rutgers.edu>
Reply-To: blm@cxsea.UUCP (Brian Matthews)
Organization: Computer X Inc.
Lines: 41

Mel Pleasant (pleasant@rutgers.rutgers.edu) writes:
|In article <2323@cxsea.UUCP> blm@cxsea.UUCP (Brian Matthews) writes:
|> I was wondering why the uucp maps posted to comp.mail.maps have such long
|> expiration periods, about a month and a half.
|Back when I did postings only once a month, being late by one day meant that
|sites would be without maps at all.  Like you, I thought that this wouldn't
|be such a big deal.  As you point out, the maps are read by a program and
|after that they aren't needed, right?  Well, wrongo!!  The number of people
|who came out of the woodwork complaining of loss of access to map files was
|astounding.  I still find it hard to believe!!  There are many more people,
|more than one would imagine, that actually use the map files to generate
|paths by hand.

Gak!  Don't these people know what computers are for??  :-).

|Given this response, there will no doubt be other comments vis a vis the map
|posting procedures.
|...
|The problem with
|"diff" postings is that it doesn't do you any good if you don't have the
|original file.  You're also sunk if "diff" postings arrive out of order or
|not at all, something not unheard of in the netnews system.  Depending upon
|"diff" postings in the general case would mean full postings at some larger
|interval.

I was considering this very question, and decided to see just how much
smaller diff postings would be (ignoring for the moment the problems that
Mel points out with diff postings).  I took some map shell scripts from
comp.mail.maps, unpacked them in a different directory than my normal map
directory, and ran diff (note:  not a context diff) against the resulting
files and the previous versions of the same files.  On the average, the
diffs were about the same size!  And remember, this is a normal diff.
The much preferable context diffs were almost always larger than the
original map file!  Now, admittedly I only tested about 20 files, so they
may have been particularly bad examples.  It was still surprising.

-- 
Brian L. Matthews                               "A power tool is not a toy.
...{mnetor,uw-beaver!ssc-vax}!cxsea!blm          Unix is a power tool."
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