Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site ucbvax.ARPA Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!prls!amdimage!amdcad!decwrl!ucbvax!kre From: kre@ucbvax.ARPA (Robert Elz) Newsgroups: net.news.group Subject: Re: The Great Net Cleanup Part II Message-ID: <9935@ucbvax.ARPA> Date: Fri, 16-Aug-85 08:44:35 EDT Article-I.D.: ucbvax.9935 Posted: Fri Aug 16 08:44:35 1985 Date-Received: Tue, 20-Aug-85 01:27:11 EDT References: <696@gatech.CSNET> <697@gatech.CSNET> <813@gatech.CSNET> Organization: University of California at Berkeley Lines: 34 Summary: A good reason for deleting "dead" groups I would have thought that someone would have remarked on this before, but, apparently not. A while back someone said that if there was some fixed limit to the number of newsgroups, that would justify (in his opinion) removing dead groups, but otherwise he preferred keeping them. Well, big surprise people, there is just such a limit, in every version of news I have seen (up to, and including 2.10.3). The limit is on the number of characters in all the newsgroup names concatenated together (including separators). On ucbvax the active file is currently about 60% there already (of the limit in 2.10.3 - I have a vague memory that the limit was set smaller in older versions). True, this is a configurable number, sites can change it, but I bet almost no-one has. And the way its used, the net effect is that the smallest limit out there wins. Asking people to recompile news with a bigger number (even if its possible due to restricted memory sizes on some archaic processors) won't get us anywhere - from the dates of some of the news versions people are still using, the source must have gone mouldy & been discarded well before now. Its possible that this limitation might be removed in some future version of news, but getting people to upgrade is impossible. Thus, if we want to keep making new groups, we simply *must* get rid of some of the old ones. Robert Elz ucbvax!kre kre@monet.berkeley.edu