kre@munnari.OZ (Robert Elz) (09/23/84)
This is just an advance announcement. I have made a bunch of fixes to the 2.10.2 distribution, which I will post to net.sources in a couple of weeks (after I'm sure that they really are fixes). The point of this announcement is to briefly describe what's been done, and why, so as to possibly save someone else from repeating the work in the meantime. Most changes are to expire.c and ifuncs.c - I will post new versions of those. A few other files have had mods, I will post diffs (both -c for you to look at, and -e to do the work for you) for those. Now for what has happened. I have removed some of the wacky restrictions on the use of flags in the sys file. It will now be possible to use the S flag without the default command string, and the U flag even if UXMIT is not defined (provided a command is given). Processing of the sys file is also a little safer. It used to be the case that a sys file like foo:net.dogs::command1 foo:net.cats::command2 would execute both command1 and command2 (probably sending the article twice) if it was posted to both net.cats & net.dogs. The duplicate would be rejected at the receiving site, but it's still a waste of traffic. Now, inews will use the first command it encounters with an appropriate subscription list (command1 in the above example). I have also added an M flag. This is principally for Australian news users (though perhaps might be useful elsewhere). The Australian network (ACSnet) allows multi-cast addressing, that is, a message can be sent to multiple hosts. The M flag provides a mechanism for the news system to use that, without losing the ability to not send to sites that have already seen the message. I won't describe the mechanism further here. Principal benefits are that only one process needs to be run to send the message along many links, and only one copy of the message is spooled (saves cpu and disk). As usually only one copy would be sent along any network link anyway, its not likely to save communication costs. Last change to inews is to change the "news older than 2 weeks is rejected rule". News from Australia has been known to take 2 weeks to reach decvax (rarely). It would be annoying if it was to be rejected because of this. Instead, there's another period (8 weeks default) defined. News older than this is rejected. To retain the benefit of preventing news floods, I have changed expire to retain article id's in the history file for the 8 week period that they would be accepted. That is, now article id's remain in the history file for 6 weeks after the article itself has been expired. This will cause somewhat larger history files (but still workable I think, especially with -ldbm) with the benefit of a rather more usable system. The 8 week period can be reduced of course, if that is too much for some sites. In the process of doing that, I squashed a whole host of bugs & buglets in expire. And made one more change. That is to allow newsgroups to be expired singly. (That is, it will now be possible to expire -e 3 -n net.jokes and have net.jokes decimated after 3 days, without losing copies of net.jokes articles that were also posted to net.math or net.puzzle). Finally, there is one change that I recommend everyone making right NOW. That is to castrate the "checkgroups" control message. I can see the uses of that, but guess that no-one has noticed its disadvantages. First, from my point of view, is that I simply don't want all the groups to exist. Only a very small fraction of them are sent to us, having directories for all the others is just a waste. Worse, it misleads local users into thinking that they can post to those groups, and have their article seen by the readers in the US. It simply doesn't happen. I hardly expect that argument to sway many of you, but you might want to consider what can be done to your news system by a single unfriendly news administrator who was to broadcast a checkgroups control message that contained something other than the standard groups list. Rmgroup wars were childs play compared to this. The easy way to effectively delete it, is to comment out the first two non-comment lines in the shell script /usr/lib/news/checkgroups. Then, if you want, arrange what is in /usr/lib/news/newsgroups to be appropriate for your site. If anyone would like to discuss any of the mods I have made, please do so by mail. But to forestall some of that, I will NOT be posting these changes to anyone until I am sure that I haven't broken anything (apart from checkgroups). Robert Elz decvax!mulga!kre
ber@enea.UUCP (09/27/84)
And who will be posting the rest of 2.10.2 then?
--
Bjorn Eriksen
ENEA DATA Sweden
UUCP: {decvax,philabs}!mcvax!enea!ber
ARPA: decvax!mcvax!enea!ber@Berkeleykre@mulga.OZ (Robert Elz) (10/05/84)
Rick has asked me to mail him the fixes - he will incorporate them (as he determines useful), and post the result, so my posting will not happen. Robert Elz (ps: for anyone seeing this who does not get net.sources, all 2.10.2 source postings go there, as do other sources)