dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) (10/10/87)
In article <2713@xanth.UUCP> in comp.sources.d kyle@xanth.UUCP (Kyle Jones) writes, as an aside, >p.s. I feel the same way about the the USENET maps. Once every six > months would be often enough, since new or changed map entries > can be posted to news.config or news.newsite . I have this wonderful idea of how to simultaneously achieve contradictory things, namely: (a) decrease UUCP map traffic and (b) keep the map postings more current. o Every four months, a full set of maps is posted. o Every two weeks, the maps are posted without any of the lines beginning with #, i.e., with only the routing data. A trivial shell script will strip these lines out, and the maps decease in size by a factor of 3 to 5. (We could also just retain the one line that identifies date of revision.) o And finally, every 4 days, a set of context diffs are posted for these stripped-out maps. Or some similar multilevel scheme optimized for greatest currency, least UUCP traffic, and greatest convenience to those who (let's face it) work quite hard to keep the maps up-to-date. Perhaps the people concerned could also add another feature to pathalias to make it work better with frequently-updated map databases: a new switch -S which means "supersede". Then, given parameters such as pathalias [ud].* -S Newmaps/[ud].* pathalias would make all information found in files after the -S switch supersede corresponding information found before the -S switch. Thus you could add new map entries to the Newmaps directory, and you would not have to search through the complete maps and delete the superseded entries. -- Rahul Dhesi UUCP: <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi