psc@lzaz.UUCP (Paul S. R. Chisholm) (01/09/86)
< Oxygen is for people who can't take New Jersey > Just before Christmas, I was in net/micro in the spool directory, and noticed that with the articles (e.g., 3045), there was a directory called 6809. I was concerned that, after our site got the article locally numbered 6808, a non-designed behavior (!) would occur, and we'd lose an article at the very least. I WAS *WRONG*. The following is a summary of some of the replies that I got; thanks to all of you. -- >From hansen Tue Dec 24 08:58 EST 1985 remote from pegasus To: lzaz!psc Subject: Re: $spool/net/micro/6809 - a bug waiting to happen Newsgroups: net.news.group In-Reply-To: <446@lzaz.UUCP> Organization: AT&T-IS Labs, Lincroft, NJ Actually, Paul, inews IS smart enough to skip over 6809 and go on to 6810. This code was put in when the current directory structure of one directory per subgroup was created. Tony Hansen, pegasus!hansen -- >From rayssd!dhb Fri Dec 27 18:31:57 1985 remote from allegra Why do you consider it a bug? Just because we will loose one potential article number at some future date? All of the current news software recognizes that this situation could occur and handles it properly. If you are really and truly concerned about this I would suggest the following: take all components of the newsgroup name and prepend some character which is not legal in an article number (my suggestion is either '$' or '%'). This has two benifits: it is now impossible for a newsgroup (directory) name to conflict with an article name and when you do an 'ls' in the directory it prints all the subdirectories first. This would actually be very easy to implement since all newsgroup names are passed to a subroutine for conversion to the proper directory name. If you wanted to you could even use a period as the character to prepend, then when you did the 'ls' all you would see are the articles. Dave Brierley; Raytheon Co.; Portsmouth RI; (401)-847-8000 x4073 {allegra, linus, ccice5} !rayssd!dhb -- From: ihnp4!ucbvax!sdcsvax!brian (Brian Kantor) Organization: UCSD wombat breeding society You won't lose the article. The news system won't overwrite existing files, but instead just advances the article counter by one. It also knows the difference between a directory and a plain file. You do realize that the article numbers are assigned on your own system when the article arrives, don't you? That they're not global? And that in all likelyhood, not the same as the ones that your neighbor has for his articles? And that therefore it doesn't matter if the numbers are disjoint? The news software sources are public domain. You could poke through them and see how this is handled. Its not a stupid piece of software. This matter has come up before. Net.micro.432 comes to mind. Brian Kantor UC San Diego decvax\ brian@ucsd.arpa ihnp4 >--- sdcsvax --- brian ucbvax/ Kantor@Nosc -- >From trwrb!felix!rlong Sat Dec 28 08:50:05 1985 remote from ihnp4 Organization: FileNet Corp., Costa Mesa, Ca. In article <446@lzaz.UUCP> you write: >Clearly, when we get about four thousand more articles, we're gonna lose >the one between 6808 and 6810. Not good. (I assume inews isn't smart >enough to skip 6809 and store that article in 6810.) Nope. Inews *is* smart enough to try storing the article at 6809, realize that it couldn't, and skip ahead and store the article at 6810. Roger L. Long, FileNet Corp, {hplabs,trwrb}!felix!bytebug -- >From utzoo!lsuc!msb Sat Dec 28 19:42:45 1985 remote from ihnp4 > ... (I assume inews isn't smart > enough to skip 6809 and store that article in 6810.) You assume wrong. Actually, I don't have personal experience with this, but it was discussed on the net long ago. Mark Brader -- -Paul S. R. Chisholm, ihnp4!lznv!psc or {pegasus,ihnp4}!lzaz!psc The above opinions might not be shared by any telcomm company. NOMINATE MARK LEEPER (mtgzz!leeper): HUGO AWARD FOR BEST FAN WRITER IN 1986