Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!cica!iuvax!maytag!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: What If...I remove "/usr/lib/news/history*" ?
Message-ID: <106189@looking.on.ca>
Date: 3 Mar 90 07:43:24 GMT
References: <490@limbo.Intuitive.Com> <1990Mar2.044311.16160@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 28
Class: discussion

Actually, throwing away history is exactly what I did a few years
ago when I was a pure simple leaf site on a small machine.

History was gone, but as a leaf, my feed would never send me duplicates,
so that was not a problem.   Cancels didn't work, but I could live with
that.

Expire was just 'find' piped into a removing program -- I could only keep
a few days news, and like most leaves, under such circumstances fancy
explicit expire dates were not a problem.

Xrefs: did cross referencing for rn.

It saved a lot of disk space and made B news faster too.  Not to mention
expire.  (Oddly enough, I only wrote my space based expire after I went back
to being a non-leaf)

In many ways #ifdef LEAF is not a bad idea for a news program.  There is
lots of stuff you don't have to do.  That is shrinking with time, however.
Cancel and supersedes become more important, and they need history.  But a
leaf may not need broadcast code etc.

This is important because leaves are usually smaller machines, even 286s.

My first was an ONYX C8002!  256K ram, 10 meg disk (including Unix, and I
still had room to run news and do other stuff, so there!)
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473