Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!vsi1!wyse!mips!sultra!root From: root@sultra.UUCP (The Super User) Newsgroups: news.misc Subject: Miscellaneous comments... Keywords: pathalias stargate etc Message-ID: <2409@sultra.UUCP> Date: 20 Sep 88 01:25:15 GMT Organization: Ultrasystems DSI, Sunnyvale, CA Lines: 42 Ok, here are a few unsolicited comments; First, what happened to news.stargate? I am *very* interested in the stargate system, but can find no newsgroup which refers to it. Where should I look for info on what's going on? Second, is there some reason that the pathalias output shows the COMPLETE route for each site? I mean, as an example; ames mips!wyse!vsi1!ames!%s In this case, I already have the following entries; mips mips!%s vsi1 mips!wyse!vsi1!%s wyse mips!wyse!%s It would make more sense to me, to do the following; ames vsi1!ames!%s mips mips!%s vsi1 wyse!vsi1!%s wyse mips!wyse!%s The two problems I see with this are 1/ it takes longer to resolve a path, and 2/ it *may* be beneficial to use a different path to C (via B), than to B, although I can't think of such a case, and even if one did exist, one could use the full route in that case. For those of us with smaller systems, having a paths file that wasn't as big would be a big win. I'm running SysV, so DBM is not present. Another possibility would be to use a uniform binary path, that wouldn't use DBM or anything else. In other words, something with a conversion table up front to convert ASCII system names to 16 (24? 32?) bit numbers, followed by an index table to reference the path for that system, and finally a list of paths, using binary system names (which can be back-indexed to the actual names). I don't claim to be an all-out pathalias expert, I'm just putting this forward for comment/flaming. Please use email to reply, and I'll post a summary. I can't really see any good reason for having the paths file in ASCII, and redundant. Comments, please??? - Der BTW: sultra appears in the Southern California maps, instead of Northern California, so if you're looking for us...