Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!lll-lcc!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!cbatt!ukma!david From: david@ukma.ms.uky.csnet (David Herron, NPR Lover) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Is the history file really needed anymore? Message-ID: <5504@ukma.ms.uky.csnet> Date: Wed, 14-Jan-87 15:50:51 EST Article-I.D.: ukma.5504 Posted: Wed Jan 14 15:50:51 1987 Date-Received: Thu, 15-Jan-87 21:57:42 EST Sender: root@ukma.ms.uky.csnet Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences, Lexington KY Lines: 62 I got to thinking the other morning and decided we're close to not needing to have the history file any more. My idea was to have a master directory in which the file names are the article-i.d. (minus the '<' and '>'). here are the pro's and con's I considered at the time. 1) knowing which links point to this file. (i.e. which newsgroup article number pairs are associated with this article). The Xrefs: header takes care of that right now ... the information is in approximately the same format as in the history file. 2) knowing when to cancel an article. Well, the ctime of the inode will be able to tell us a lot about when to do this ... the rest would come from opening the article and looking for the Expires: line. The only new limitation would be knowing when there was an Expires: line present which specified a shorter-than-default time. I wonder if anybody ever does this? 3) knowing when articles have been canceled. currently this is done by having an entry in the history file that says it has been canceled. I've seen some *really*old* entries of that sort (I don't remember which news version) ... Anyway a similar thing could be done by just leaving a file in the master directory. 4) the Unix behaviour of being quadratic on directory searches. hmmm ... offhand I'd say that the only program which would directly use the master directory is expire and it should only be run once a day. Further, expire could be written to be intelligent about the way it runs through the directories. (i.e. not a lot of random looking about in the directory, but linear search ... ) 5) article id's are too long for non-flexname-in-the-file-system-people. I'm tempted to just say "aaawwwww" but that's not fair. Something could be done like split it into a heirarchy of some sort... (which would help in point 4 as well). I'm thinking of the way terminfo keeps its' terminal descriptions. 6) we'd be able to get away from dbm... it's a "yay" for xenix and sysv people ... they'd no longer be second class citizens. we'd also be able to get away from the hackery in place to make sure the history file doesn't get corrupted by insertions happening during an expire (etc). [I did kind of like the comment in the 2.11 installation doc about how to get dbm if you don't have it already.] Are there any other issues? Like I said, it's just random thinking. -- ----- David Herron, cbosgd!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET, david@ms.uky.csnet ----- (also "postmaster", "news", "netnews", "uucp", "mmdf", and ...) ----- (and the map maintainer for Kentucky.) ----- "Don't put your money in South Africa -- Give it to me!" -- Cerebus