news@t4test.UUCP (Chip Rosenthal) (04/06/84)
We have just discovered a problem with V2.10 inews having to do with postings to multiple newsgroups. The symptom is that an article which is to be posted locally to multiple newsgroups is in fact posted only to the last newsgroup in the list. The following is from the Eunice distribution of the Manual: +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | LINK(2) UNIX Programmer's Manual LINK(2) | | | | Since VMS does not support reference counts, the link call | | cannot be as general under EUNICE as it is under UNIX. What | | EUNICE does is to emulate the interaction between link and | | unlink which is used in UNIX to perform the file rename | | function. The call to link does nothing but verify the | | name1 operand and remember the name2 operand. If an unlink | | call is made and the filenameR operand matches the link | | name1 operand, the file specified by filename is renamed to | | the saved name2 name. | | | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ I interpret this to mean that as long as the process which called link is around, name2 and name1 can be used to refer to the same file. When the process goes away, so does any reference to name2. My hypothesis is that inews dumps the article into a temp file, the temp file linked to the first newsgroup entry, the first newsgroup entry is linked to the second newsgroup entry, etc. When the inews process is completed, all links disappear, and all that is left is the article under the name of the Nth newsgroup entry. It seems that the answer would be to replace the linking operation with a copying operation. Yuch!! The disc space used will shoot through the roof. Has anybody run into this problem? Any suggestions, comments, answers, or hacks? Chip Rosenthal, Intel/Santa Clara {pur-ee,hplabs,ucbvax!amd70,ogcvax!omsvax}!intelca!t4test!{chip,news}