wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (07/18/85)
We *desperately* need a fix to rn's Pnews process so that it saves the draft in /tmp until after _everything_ has completed successfully. I just had to endure the loss of a completed and edited posting because, after I replied "s" to the Send, abort,... question after finishing the posting, the system came back with some nonsense message from "inews" about the filesystem being full, and it couldn't post it. Maybe so; the problem was that, when I then went to /tmp to try to copy my posting so I could re-submit it, it *wasn't there*!!! It had been written out to /tmp completely with no trouble when I ended the editing, so there was plenty of filesystem space there. There is *no* excuse for the software deleting the /tmp copy BEFORE the posting has been successful; if it had put it in "dead.article" or somewhere, it would have been OK, but it just flat *died* and threw away all my work! It is unreasonable to expect people to have to remember to do special manual "saves" or ":w filename" commands every time they post, just on the chance that the software will screw them like it just did me. It should be built in a "fail-safe" manner, so that any problems will still leave the user his text or draft for future use. Will Martin UUCP/USENET: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin or ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA
lwall@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Larry Wall) (07/26/85)
In article <3@brl-tgr.ARPA> wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) writes: >We *desperately* need a fix to rn's Pnews process so that it saves the >draft in /tmp until after _everything_ has completed successfully. That's kind of difficult, because the fault in this case was inews, not Pnews. Pnews waits for inews to exit with a status that is supposed to say whether the posting was successful. Unfortunately, inews sometimes lies. I don't know what Pnews can do about that, except perhaps to implement the AUTHORCOPY option, which would save everything you post forever and ever. Too bad there isn't a way to say "Delete this file in 3 hours" without leaving a process hanging around. Maybe we should make the temp file ~/.article, or some such, and just leave it around till the next time you post. That would also help the people who lose the /tmp file when the system crashes. Hmm, that should really be "${DOTDIR-$HOME}/.article", in case people are sharing accounts. Okay, I'll send out a patch for it. A little more cruft in DOTDIR, but who's counting? Larry Wall {allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,sdcsvax}!sdcrdcf!lwall