From: dawson@morpheus.bssi.bls.com (Willard Dawson)
Newsgroups: comp.bbs.waffle
Subject: Re: News/mail reader
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 15:06:18 GMT
Organization: BellSouth Systems Integration

eoin@xocolatl.com (John F. Snyder) writes:

>bobk@dogear.spk.wa.us (Bob Kirkpatrick) writes:
>
>-> kjhoule@iowegia.uucp (Kevin Houle) writes:
>-> 
>-> > For the time being, I've written a program that does just that. Given a
>-> > root directory on the command line, the program recurses through the
>-> > root and sub-directories and deletes duplicate articles based on the
>-> > Message-ID header. As duplicates are removed, the filenames are
>-> > resequenced in ascending order starting with the lowest original
>-> > article. If anyone is interested, let me know.
>
>-> I'm VERY interested. Depending on size, perhaps an encoded posting?
>
>Me too.
>
>Is the resequencing a configurable option?  
>
>I can see folks missing articles after the numbers have been
>compressed and/or having their join pointers reset because it is now
>greater then the actual number of the messages.

Methinks Kevin has overlooked this problem?  I'd be interested in reading
how one would work through the problem of updating each user's join file
to reflect the highest message read, and keeping it properly sync-ed with
the new "highest numbered" message per newsgroup.  It all sounds quite
nasty, and like it would be probably be compute-intensive... you'd have
to update each line in each join file.

Let's suppose you have 1000 users, each of which is subscribed to all of
Usenet, plus a few alt groups, and maybe some local groups.  How about
1000 lines per join file... gee, that's 1,000,000 lines to reset, each
time you resequence the articles.

That sounds like a lot of work, and I believe is all really quite unnecessary.
Waffle will continue to work just fine if you simply delete old articles.
Resequencing is not necessary.  If you want to avoid the join file reset
problem, have your "expire" utility save the highest numbered file, rather
than delete it.  This is not an universally good workaround, as there is
at least one situation I can think of where I'd prefer not to keep the
highest numbered article, even if its deletion means that users' join files
get reset back to 0.

The proper solution to the join file reset problem is to fix Waffle!  What
ought to occur, on the occasion that a user's join file indicates an article
higher than is available, is that Waffle ought to reset the join file line
to the highest numbered article in the group, such that that article is
lower-numbered than the previous entry in the join file.

>
> eoin@xocolatl.com  |      Practice Random Kindness   /~~~~~~~~~~~~~\  /
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-- 
Willard Dawson, BellSouth Advanced Networks, 1100 Johnson Ferry Road, Ste. 890
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