karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) (12/09/88)
If you try to use a 'sed' script to hack your pathalias input straight out of /usr/spool/news/comp/mail/maps, beware that if you ever miss a map or for any other reason fail to get one of your maps superseded you can end up with multiple copies of the same region. For example, if your site misses a map posting, the previous one will not be superseded. When a subsequent map for the same region comes in, the article ID that its "Supersedes:" line references isn't the for one you have, it's for the one you missed. Voila, you will now have multiple copies of the same region hanging around with *long* expiration dates. Since the shell sorts wildcards, the articles containing maps are fed to pathalias oldest-to-newest. Thus if you have more than one article containing maps for a region, the site entries in the oldest one will be the ones pathalias uses. (Mild disclaimer here -- I am not a pathalias guru.) Also, if you have local changes you still need to provide a way to pick that stuff up. A sedscript to crack maps from the article spool directory is not the last word on this. As to the idea of cracking shars with a program other than sh, there are a lot of shar formats out there. I am surprised more people didn't endorse peter@ficc.uu.net's proposal that a Software Tools-like, human readable archive format be adopted for distributing archives. Under this plan, the only result of unarchiving files would be files in the current or selected directory or subdirectories thereof. This seems more desirable than running trojan horses. -- -- "We've been following your progress with considerable interest, not to say -- contempt." -- Zaphod Beeblebrox IV -- uunet!sugar!karl, Unix BBS (713) 438-5018