bill@ssbn.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy) (01/22/89)
This site is having some trouble with undesired groups "leaking"
in from neighbors. Before proceeding, let me admit that I have
been awarded the "Most Obfuscated sys line" prize by one or more
of the neighbors. My sys line is quite bulky, an awful lot of
!group entries.
It appears (to me) that the culprit is the s_read function in
funcs2.c. Admittedly the culprit is really me for such a huge
sys line, but bear with me. It appears that s_read collects a
character at a time from the sys file, discarding escaped newlines
and other white space. It further appears that if the entry is
larger than LBUFLEN (default 1024 bytes) that it silently
truncates the line and returns what it has. Is that correct?
I'll ASSume that the answer to that question is yes to pose the
other questions. Since I don't think it's fair to ask my
neighbors to remake news just because I want to be finicky about
ten jillion !group entries, I see one way to ameliorate the
situation, i.e. put the "not's" right after the "all" in descending
order of "not'dness" and have the least desirable groups notted first.
I see discussion of "meta groups" sprinkled here and there in the
source. Does that mean that I could perhaps use a meta group to
specify all the stuff I don't want and lift the 1K length restriction?
If it's in TFM then I am blind, I was unable to find any reference
to meta groups anyplace.
The two obvious things to do are to be less finicky or to remake
news with LBUFLEN set to something like 2 or 3K. I can certainly
do the first, and might ask the neighbors to do the second, but I
would prefer any other suggestions that the news gurus might have.
The motivation here is to save some LD phone $$ that are being spent
on groups that no one here or downstream reads. If they're not read,
then I'd like to save the $$ and the inodes on them. Thanks for
your patience,
--
Bill Kennedy usenet {killer,att,cs.utexas.edu,sun!daver}!ssbn!bill
internet bill@ssbn.WLK.COM