Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.cs.toronto.edu!moraes
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: moraes@cs.toronto.edu (Mark Moraes)
Subject: Re: New .newsrc format [was Dynamic "smart" expiration?]
Message-ID: <90Jan4.232150est.2590@neat.cs.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
References: <69903@looking.on.ca> <433@texas.dk>
Date: 5 Jan 90 04:22:58 GMT
Lines: 43

storm@texas.dk (Kim F. Storm) writes:
>It keeps a time-stamp and a seek offset in the active file in a
>separate file.  This works just fine until the day where somebody
>choses to rebuild the active file (or just sorts it) [the consequences
>of this is left as an excercise to the reader :-].  It also makes
>simlutaneous use of rn and other news readers problematic if they
>don't know about rn's hack.  For example, nn will treat the missing
>groups as new groups (with default subscription), and add them to
>.newsrc.

This was what the C News better.way patch, and the active.times file
were meant to fix. They offered a slightly cleaner and unambiguous way
of determining newsgroup creation -- the active.times file is always
sorted in order of newsgroup creation at your site, simply because
newgroup will always append to it. (It also means it stores some more
information -- the last new group created, and time it was created,
and the creator) It lets the time of newsgroup creation be determined
by the only authoritative source -- the transport system. (Otherwise,
rn had an interesting technique of going at stat'ing article 1 in every
newsgroup to see if they were newly created, I think) The only support
they require from the transport system is that whatever/whoever
processes the newgroup control message make the appropriate addition
to the active.times file. tail on our active.times file shows:

comp.sys.ncr 630434048 news@cs.purdue.EDU (News Knower)
alt.suicide.holiday 630486601 usenet@well.UUCP
bit.listserv.word-pc 631323032 WHV@PSUVM.BITNET (Bill Verity)
rec.sport.pro-wrestling 631354979 njs@scifi.UUCP (Nicholas J. Simicich)
list.unitex 631398794 lamy@csri.toronto.edu (Jean-Francois Lamy)

With the active.times file and all people that use it running a
patched rn, you can hopefully do what you like with the active file
then. (This is the theory -- I think rn may still go and trash the
.newsrc when it finds the soft pointers invalid even though it is not
supposed to -- I've never dared to experiment:-) rn is really touchy
about the active file changing - I learnt the hard way not to read
news early on Saturday mornings when updact ran...

I remember that Geoff Collyer once mentioned once that if we could
make rn less sensitive to active file changes, the active file could
be sorted in reverse order by the second field (i.e.  highest volume
newsgroup at the top), which might improve news transport performance
further.