Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!leah!rpi!batcomputer!cornell!uw-beaver!blake!ogccse!littlei!uunet!mcvax!cernvax!ethz!ethz-inf!wyle
From: wyle@inf.ethz.ch (Mitchell Wyle)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Archiving Source-Related Postings
Message-ID: <128@inf.ethz.ch>
Date: 30 Mar 89 16:36:41 GMT
References: <17900001@vantage.UUCP>
Reply-To: wyle@inf.ethz.ch (Mitchell Wyle)
Organization: Departement fuer Informatik, ETH Zuerich
Lines: 53

In article <17900001@vantage.UUCP> ray@vantage.UUCP (Ray Liere) writes:
>We are considering starting an archive for comp.sources.unix and
>comp.sources.misc postings.

Other people have been doing it for a long time.

>As a first cut, I plan on writing a script that will break apart the BODY.TEXT
>file into the individual postings.

Please post your script.

>related bug reports, patches, comments on experiences, discussions, etc.
>that are posted in the comp.sources.bugs and comp.sources.d groups?

Very often.  I apply patches directly from rn and mush.  I ignore bug
reports unless we've already been bitten by them.

>It would be nice to be able to "mate" applicable postings in these
>groups to the originally posted source in some automated manner ...

I'm not sure you want to take the human out of the loop to separate the
appropriate bugs/patches from meaningless ones.  Do you need postscript
stuff for A4 paper?  Do you use MMDF as your mail transport?  Do you
care about code that extracts text from X.400 p2 format?  You need a
human filter to separate the men from the chaff, the wheat from the
boys...

>Any pointers would be very much appreciated.

Check out narc; simple shell scripts based on find(1)ing files in a
news source spool directory which arrived after a touch(1) file was
accessed are as efficient as C code.  Also look at sending expire(8)ed
source articles into your script.  BTW: A neat way to have a script
re-schedule itself (when you don't have access to crontab or Sun OS
4.0) is:

case `date +%a` in
  Mon) day=Tue ;;
  Tue) day=Wed ;;
  Wed) day=Thu ;;
  Thu) day=Fri ;;
  Fri) day=Sat ;;
  Sat) day=Sun ;;
  Sun) day=Mon ;;
esac; 
at 0200 $day <your script>

Why extract out the files from those carefully packed cshars R$ puts
together?  I find them much more convenient.
-- 
-Mitchell F. Wyle                         wyle@ethz.uucp
Institut fuer Informationssysteme         wyle@inf.ethz.ch
ETH Zentrum / 8092 Zurich, Switzerland    +41 1 256 5237