Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!oliveb!jerry
From: jerry@oliveb.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Map expiration dates
Message-ID: <13173@oliveb.olivetti.com>
Date: 18 Jan 88 19:53:51 GMT
References: <2323@cxsea.UUCP> <7815@rutgers.rutgers.edu> <12829@oliveb.olivetti.com> <296@fig.bbn.com> <1662@desint.UUCP>
Reply-To: jerry@oliveb.UUCP (Jerry Aguirre)
Organization: Olivetti ATC; Cupertino, Ca
Lines: 23

In article <1662@desint.UUCP> geoff@desint.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning) writes:
>Unfortunately, those systems (like me) that are short on i-nodes are also
>those which are short on disk space.  Packing files into a 'tar' archive
>requires temp space equal to twice the size of the files and doesn't allow
>individual file replacement.  'ar' is stupider about temp space, and requires
>as much as three times the total map size in the temp space.  Grepping
>out the '#' lines is possible, but unfortunately throws away useful
>information like geographical locations and how to reach the administrator
>at a particular site.

The point about temp space is a good one.  For this and other reasons I
would not recommend storing the maps in one huge maps.a file.

What I would suggest is maintaing some of the current organization so
that, for example, "u.usa.ca.a" could be an archive of all the
California entries.  Updates could do an "ar r u.usa.ca.a tempfile".
This would minimize the temp space and copy overhead because only that
fraction of the map would be handled.

The point is that the split into u.usa.ca is functional.  The split into
u.usa.ca.[1-6] is purely a result of uucp restrictions.

					Jerry Aguirre @ Olivetti ATC