dennis@rlgvax.UUCP (Dennis Bednar) (01/14/87)
The active file format is
newsgroup high low
which means that when you have high==low==5,
that article number 5 is the only article in
the group.
However, I have seen cases when expire removed the
last article in the group, and yet the active file
still says "group 00005 00005". This is ambiguous,
because you cannot tell if there are no articles or only one
article. I found this out when I wrote an active
file checker (to make sure that the active file doesn't
get clobbered accidently. Happened a few times with
2.10.3 beta news, and I was paranoid for 2.11 news.
It has not happened yet, though).
Is there a technical reason why the active is not encoded a
different way when the newsgroup is empty, to prevent this ambiguity?
(Perhaps "group 00005 00000" could mean that the group
is empty, but that 5 was the highest article ever seen at
one time).
--
-Dennis Bednar
{decvax,ihnp4,harpo,allegra}!seismo!rlgvax!dennis UUCP