neal@denelcor.UUCP (Neal Weidenhofer) (03/07/84)
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A couple of questions/gripes about readnews and associated topics:
1. Why does "U" (unsubscribe) take so long -- sometimes
> 25 min (on a moderately loaded pdp-11/44)?
2. I am trying to split my news reading into two parts --
"work" and "personal". To do this, I created a couple
shell scripts that look like:
cp x .newsrc
readnews
cp .newsrc x
The problem is that the second cp USUALLY doesn't work --
after I exit readnews and get my prompt back, x is
unchanged. About one time in ten, x is updated properly.
I can (and do) always redo the cp by hand and it works
then. Can anyone help?
Regards,
Neal Weidenhofer
Denelcor, Inc.
<hao|csu-cs|brl-bmd>!denelcor!nealdmmartindale@watcgl.UUCP (Dave Martindale) (03/08/84)
The U command itself takes almost no time. But finding the first article in the next group may take a long time indeed if it is a group you haven't been reading regularly. Readnews looks for articles in ascending sequence one at a time. If the next group is net.unix-wizards and the first unexpired article on your machine is number 5000, and you haven't read anything in this group before, it will look for article 1, then 2, then 3, until it finally gets to 5000. You may wait a long time. A quick-and-dirty fix is to grep unix-wizards in /usr/lib/news/active; the number is the highest-received article to date; say it's 6000. Then find the unix-wizards line in your .newsrc and alter it to read net.unix-wizards: 1-5900 Ugh. I believe someone posted some code to deal with this, but we don't have it installed here either. A reasonable way to handle this is to have readnews read the directory, build a bit map of articles which do exist, invert the map to become a set of articles which don't exist, and then or this into the bit map obtained from the user's .newsrc so that all the non-existent articles appear to have been read. I don't have time to implement it though. Dave Martindale
dave@utcsrgv.UUCP (Dave Sherman) (03/08/84)
~| From: neal@denelcor.UUCP (Neal Weidenhofer)
~| 1. Why does "U" (unsubscribe) take so long -- sometimes
~| > 25 min (on a moderately loaded pdp-11/44)?
It doesn't. I suspect what's happening is that after the U, you're moving
on to a newsgroup where, for one reason or another (e.g., new user,
faulty .newsrc), readnews is trying to start at a low numbered
article while the next valid article is high-numbered (in a busy
newsgroup). It tries to open every consecutively numbered file until
it finds one which works. Hence the delay. An easy fix (for you) is to
change your .newsrc. There has also been a fix posted to the net.
~| 2. I am trying to split my news reading into two parts --
~| "work" and "personal". To do this, I created a couple
~| shell scripts that look like:
~| cp x .newsrc
~| readnews
~| cp .newsrc x
~| The problem is that the second cp USUALLY doesn't work --
~| after I exit readnews and get my prompt back, x is
~| unchanged. About one time in ten, x is updated properly.
There's a much better way. I use it so my wife can read a few
newsgroups. Create a file in your bin (call it "pnews" for
personal news if you like) which contains:
echo Personal news coming up...
HOME=/u4/dave/pnews
NEWSRC=/u4/dave/pnews/.newsrc
NEWSBOX=/u4/dave/pnews
NAME="<if you want a different name for postings>"
export HOME NAME NEWSBOX NEWSRC
readnews
Then create a subdirectory pnews. Presto - you have a directory
in which you can run separate news. As an added bonus, all saved
articles will go into that directory, so you can isolate your personal
from work-related files. Now run pnews, and unsubscribe to all
work-related groups. In your regular readnews, unsubscribe to
all non-work-related groups.
Hope this helps. Let me know if it works for you.
Dave Sherman
Toronto
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