henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (07/11/90)
Does anybody but me make actual use of the -p option in C News expire? If not, it is likely to get the axe. It's always been sort of a kludge, and it is becoming increasingly inconvenient. -- NFS is a wonderful advance: a Unix | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology filesystem with MSDOS semantics. :-( | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry
del@thrush.mlb.semi.harris.com (Don Lewis) (07/11/90)
In article <1990Jul10.175636.15964@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes: >Does anybody but me make actual use of the -p option in C News expire? >If not, it is likely to get the axe. It's always been sort of a kludge, >and it is becoming increasingly inconvenient. No, I never noticed it before. It looks like it would be useful though, our archives would be a lot handier if they had an index. What else is available to perform this function if -p is removed? -- Don "Truck" Lewis Harris Semiconductor Internet: del@mlb.semi.harris.com PO Box 883 MS 62A-028 Phone: (407) 729-5205 Melbourne, FL 32901
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (07/11/90)
In article <1990Jul10.235857.2352@mlb.semi.harris.com> del@thrush.mlb.semi.harris.com (Don Lewis) writes: >>Does anybody but me make actual use of the -p option in C News expire? ... > >No, I never noticed it before. It looks like it would be useful though... >What else is available to perform this function if -p is removed? Something will be available to do it if -p goes away. I'm not sure, yet, of the details, but we and others do use the functionality. (I've already gotten several bits of mail saying "yes, we use it".) The motive behind this, by the way, is twofold. One is that -p has always been kind of ugly, with one fixed set of contents and no way to change it without digging around in the insides of a C program. The other is that with -p taking up stdout, statistics reports (which are due to be expanded substantially) have to go to stderr, which is annoying because it would be nice to reserve stderr for genuine errors. Worse, there are other things that might want to use stdout; expire is just plain short of convenient file descriptors. -- NFS is a wonderful advance: a Unix | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology filesystem with MSDOS semantics. :-( | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry