Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: C News, 386/ix, assorted questions/experiences
Message-ID: <1989Aug14.160551.5241@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1989Aug13.161806.15829@jdyx.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 89 16:05:51 GMT

In article <1989Aug13.161806.15829@jdyx.UUCP> tpf@jdyx.UUCP (Tom Friedel) writes:
>... Expire -c 'checks consistency of active file'. 
>What exactly does expire -c do? 

Basically, expire -c does all of expire's startup processing -- including
reading and parsing the expiry control file and the active file -- and then
exits.  It's mostly a debugging aid for people fiddling with control files.

> And what is the best way to use NN with C News?

As we've said before in this forum, news readers that expect a contiguous
or even near-contiguous sequence of articles between the "min" and "max"
numbers from the active file are broken, pure and simple -- this assumption
is just plain wrong.  It was fixed in the major news readers, e.g. B News
"readnews", years ago.  All I can suggest is running "upact" nightly in
the wee small hours.

>If i get an article that is posted to two newsgroups, one which i get
>and one which I don't, C News will put it into the first group
>on the newsgroups: line (creating the directory if necessary), regardless 
>of whether or not this group is in my sys file.

As Geoff has pointed out, there are complicated interactions between the
sys file and the active file here.  We spent considerable effort and
head-scratching getting the C News behavior "right", in the sense of
being the behavior that was most useful and gave the most control.
It's not, unfortunately, trivial to understand.

>When I first tried to build C News with dbz, I got a segmentation fault
>in dbz hash(). I rebuilt with dbm and all was OK.  I am guessing that
>i needed to do a mkhistory before posting to the newly created C News
>with dbz, but have not confirmed this theory.  

Correct.  Dbm and dbz files are *not* compatible; it has to be all one
or all the other.
-- 
V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu