Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!maytag!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: C News patch of 10-Jan-1990
Message-ID: <75308@looking.on.ca>
Date: 11 Jan 90 05:15:37 GMT
References: <1990Jan11.000427.29455@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 28
Class: discussion

In article <1990Jan11.000427.29455@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>This one introduces one major change:  relaynews now completely implements
>the silly "Supersedes" header.  We still think that most current uses of
>Supersedes do not justify it, but Brad Templeton (always the nuisance :-))
>has found a real use for it, and there may be more.

I found a use for it indeed.  But I had to stop using it.  It wasn't just
C News's fault -- there are enough bad B newses out there as well.

And the Supersedes concept, as currently designed, is broken when it
runs into batching, at least if you supersede so quickly that two supersedes
go in the same batch.

So right now I just send out lots of control messages.

An another note, that causes a problem with RN.  Really active ClariNet
groups with major stories have lots of holes in them, created by stories
that were updated, cancelling the old version.

RN has code to deliberately sleep for 1.3 seconds when it finds such a hole,
which makes an annoying delay.  Never bothered me much on my fast console,
but it's a big pain when using RRN, which considers the holes as
'unreadable articles'

Easy fix -- tone down or remove the sleep and pause calls in ng.c.
Who cares about a pause to show where a cancelled article was, anyway?
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473