eww (09/10/82)
Because our site must restrict its news groups, our subscription
list in the "sys" file has grown much larger than the 128
character buffer allowed for in the "s_nbuf" string of the "srec"
structure defined in the include file "params.h". The symptoms
of this problem are duplicate articles, which are not trashed,
because the "history" file isn't updated. Don't count on error
diagnostics, since the routine that checks for "sys" string
overflow, does its thing on a temporary string which IS
sufficiently long enough for now. To fix this problem, I
increased the "s_nbuf" string declaration to use LBUFLEN rather
than BUFLEN, where LBUFLEN is defined in "defs.h" to be 1024.
The corrected structure from "params.h" is as follows:
struct srec {
char s_name[NAMELEN+1]; /* system name */
char s_nbuf[LBUFLEN]; /* system subscriptions */
char s_flags[BUFLEN]; /* system flags */
char s_xmit[BUFLEN]; /* system xmit routine */
};
While this fixes the problem for now, what happens when our
subscription list gets larger than LBUFLEN characters in length?
This is the same problem we had before with the user's
subscription list in the ".newsrc" file. In future versions (we
are running 2.9) wouldn't it be a good idea to list the news
groups one to a line like we now do for the ".newsrc" files?
Ed (wheps!eww)
E. W. Whelan, Jr.
Bell Laboratories, Room 6D-110
Whippany N.J. 07981 Phone 201-386-4799 Lab X7468