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From: news@stl.stc.co.uk (News admin c/o dww)
Newsgroups: news.admin,uk.news,news.software.b
Subject: The End Of The Net As We Have Known It happened already
Summary: >512 groups in the UK
Keywords: 512, news 2.11
Message-ID: <1275@stl.stc.co.uk>
Date: 25 Mar 89 10:14:52 GMT
Reply-To: dww@stl.stc.co.uk (David Wright)
Organization: STL Harlow, UK
Lines: 24

Among the various current EOTNAWHKI scenarios is "there will be too
many news groups and news systems will crash".

I recently installed news on a new machine, and in testing it used
'readnews' for the first time in years: it coredumped and quit.  
The reason?  There are now >512 news groups in the UK.   546 at this
site, including 11 local ones.   I had not noticed before, as rn and
friends didn't seem to mind the number.

This magic number is often given as one reason why we cannot have more
newsgroups (there are other reasons for restricting the number, of
course, but they involve judgement on each case rather than a fixed
limit).  It turns out that all the modern news stuff - rn, nntp etc. - 
doesn't have a fixed limit, it just stats the active file and mallocs 
enough space for it.  As for readnews, you just put
g/LINES/s/512/1024/p
into your ..news/src/localize.sh and do make, make install.
Use 2048 if you don't want to do it again in couple of years :-).

Conclusion: don't worry about the '512' limit, most sites won't even notice
its passing.  Those that still use readnews (are there any?) will have to
either miss out some groups or re-make news.

That still leaves all those other reasons for EOTNAWHKI of course...