smk@linus.UUCP (05/24/83)
What a drag! I blew away the active file yesterday, but today I
blew away the history file! The recon-hist stuff was OK but didn't
detect multiple groups like the old 2.9 expire did (I think). ... and
it was SLOW! So I put in the fixes to 2.10 expire to get the
-r and -h options in.
I noticed code in expire about the NART define being static
(and a problem). I remember I boosted mine from 100 to 5000, but why
waste memory? I made the array dynamic and you can choose (at compile
time) the size of chunks you get. Moat of the conversion pain was
due to alternating between a.b.c and a/b/c naming conventions, but it
works now.
In 2.9, there were no history.{pag,dir} files to update. The -r
flag in 2.10 news calls a routine which is merely cvt.hist.c to
rebuild the DBM format files for history.
I could diff the code, but I decided to send the whole thing
to net.sources. A man page is sent in net.sources also. Enjoy!
--steve
PS -- We need a similar thing for the active file (that maybe hunts down
all the .newsrc file in people's dirs to get the current article (in case
I post 20 and delte them all -- then I don't get to see the next 20 if
active has a 0 count). I'll leave this challenge for someone else.