news@stl.stc.co.uk (News admin c/o dww) (03/25/89)
Among the various current EOTNAWHKI scenarios is "there will be too many news groups and news systems will crash". I recently installed news on a new machine, and in testing it used 'readnews' for the first time in years: it coredumped and quit. The reason? There are now >512 news groups in the UK. 546 at this site, including 11 local ones. I had not noticed before, as rn and friends didn't seem to mind the number. This magic number is often given as one reason why we cannot have more newsgroups (there are other reasons for restricting the number, of course, but they involve judgement on each case rather than a fixed limit). It turns out that all the modern news stuff - rn, nntp etc. - doesn't have a fixed limit, it just stats the active file and mallocs enough space for it. As for readnews, you just put g/LINES/s/512/1024/p into your ..news/src/localize.sh and do make, make install. Use 2048 if you don't want to do it again in couple of years :-). Conclusion: don't worry about the '512' limit, most sites won't even notice its passing. Those that still use readnews (are there any?) will have to either miss out some groups or re-make news. That still leaves all those other reasons for EOTNAWHKI of course...
mdr@doc.ic.ac.uk (Mark Ryan) (04/04/89)
In article <1275@stl.stc.co.uk> news@stl.stc.co.uk (News admin c/o dww) writes: > That still leaves all those other reasons for EOTNAWHKI of course... Naive user wants to know what these are