paul@actrix.gen.nz (Paul Gillingwater) (11/30/90)
I have a strange problem.... I think it may be in my C news active file. The symptom is that my trn mthreads program always lists 0 articles as being marked expired from its database -- they just keep growing. A related problem with rn is that it always thinks that there are articles going back to #1. Checking out my active file, I can see that the third field is almost always 0 or 1 -- e.g. actrix 0000000369 0000000000 y fido.askthedr 0000000005 0000000001 y fido.aus_genealogy 0000000029 0000000001 y nz.comp 0000000109 0000000000 y nz.general 0000000839 0000000000 y alt.artcom 0000000116 0000000001 y alt.atheism 0000001491 0000000001 y ... I suspect (but don't know) that the third field is used to keep track of the oldest message -- and guess that this should be updated by the expire program (doexpire). Unfortunately, even though we've been running C news for over a year, they haven't changed! I guess it's time to fix it. Any suggestions? echo "thanks" >/dev/future -- Paul Gillingwater, paul@actrix.gen.nz
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (12/02/90)
In article <1990Nov30.084418.19632@actrix.gen.nz> paul@actrix.gen.nz (Paul Gillingwater) writes: >I suspect (but don't know) that the third field is used to keep >track of the oldest message -- and guess that this should be updated >by the expire program (doexpire). Unfortunately, even though we've >been running C news for over a year, they haven't changed! As per the documentation -- see expire(8) -- the third field is updated by a separate program, which you must arrange to run if you need it. (Actually, running it, or rather the fast version of it which lurks in the expire source directory but isn't well documented, is probably going to become part of the default installation, because too many badly-written programs have come to depend on this ugly kludge.) -- "The average pointer, statistically, |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry