[news.software.anu-news] Rename newsgroups? And a suggestion for NEWS V??

SYSNET@cc.nu.oz (David Morrison) (08/01/89)

In article <6342@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>, SLOANE@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu (Bob Sloane) writes:
> NEWS> ADD FILE/RETRY NEWS_DEVICE:[old.group]*.ITM

There is one problem with this, although it might not bother you if you are 
not too pedantic :-)

The files have names like 1.itm, 2.itm, 3.itm, ...

If you use a wildcard as above, you will get them in the order

1 10 100 101 102 .. 109 11 110 111 .. 119 12 120 121 .. 199 2 20 201 202 etc

In other words, item 2 will be 200 items away from item 1.

For some purposes, I refer to the files directly, without using news.  This
means I have to do various gyrations to get everything into the right order. 

So, a suggestion for a future version of NEWS is to make the file names a 
fixed length, say 5 digits, so we would have names like 00001.itm, 00002.itm, 
etc.  (This is not to say that all references to an item number should have 
leading zeroes, just that the file names should.)
-- 
David Morrison, Network Manager, Uni of Newcastle, Australia
Try sysnet@cc.nu.oz.au or sysnet@cc.nu.oz  (mail only)
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