Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!usc!bbn!oliveb!amdahl!drivax!davison
From: davison@drivax.UUCP (Wayne Davison)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: C News, 386/ix, assorted questions/experiences
Message-ID: <24E7016E.1749@drivax.UUCP>
Date: 14 Aug 89 17:29:16 GMT
References: <1989Aug13.161806.15829@jdyx.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: Digital Research, Monterey, CA.
Lines: 28

tpf@jdyx.UUCP (Tom Friedel) writes:
>I am running nn, which expires based upon 3 field in active file.  
>C News does not update this field with expire, and upact is murder
>on my disk drive.

Are you at least running the modified version of upact that replaces the

	min=`ls $NEWSARTS/$dir | egrep '^[0-9]+$' | sort -nr | tail -1`
with
	min=`lowest $NEWSARTS/$dir`

(after building and installing lowest, of course)?  This in itself decreased
the running time of upact from slightly over 14 minutes to about 7 minutes &
20 seconds.  (We run 4.3BSD on a vax 11/780 with only about 30 meg of news
on-line).  I only discovered this "option" after writing an entirely C version
of my own (but it executes in 30 seconds, so I'm not complaining).  I'm going
to send it to the C news folk for their perusal as an optional upact (it
requires directory functions, so they probably won't want to make it the
default, like "lowest" isn't the default).

Also, it is my firm belief that empty newsgroups should have their min field
set to one higher than their max field -- newsreaders like rn & nn interpret
this as an empty group rather than a group with 1 non-existant message.  I
wrote my upact that way, and modified addgroup to start with an initial value
of "group.name 0000000000 0000000001".
-- 
Wayne Davison          \  /| / /| \/ /| /(_)         davison@drivax.UUCP
                      (_)/ |/ /\| / / |/  \          ...!amdahl!drivax!davison