Creeping Bit Rot in Bnews

[azure!stevenm]

When I first installed the B news system, I was overjoyed at the great
decrease in maintenance effort and user complaints over A news. I
recent weeks, however, I have had an ever increasing number of users
come to me with bizaare problems. I will briefly enumerate them:

1) the '.newsrc' lines getting article numbers wiped out. A line will
go from 'foo: 1-30' to 'foo: 1,30-35', and the next session, the user
will get 2-29 again. I believe that this has been mentioned before in
the news.

2) '.newsrc' files being totally or partially wiped out. One person has
about 20 lines deleted from his '.newsrc' with no warning.

3) A spate of old messages. Today, I got a raft of messages from the
Jan 12, Jan 13, Jan 14 timeframe which we had already seen at our
system.

4) 'checknews' gives 'readnews' an environment arg when the '-e' switch
is invoked. I have a fix for this.

5) There is no apparent way for checknews to determine if an article
which has not been read has been deleted. I expected the 'x's in the
'.<newsgrp>' files to be replaced with blanks or something when
articles are deleted, but this is not being done.

Also, I have a suggestion about the newsgroup proliferation issue:

1) when the total number of retained articles in a newsgroup goes to
zero, remove the directory, and the entry in 'active'.

2) When a user reads news, remove any lines which do not have
corresponding lines in the 'active' file.

This will serve to clean out the active file, the news directory, and
the user's .newsrc files.

S. McGeady

[watmath!bstempleton]

I don't think automatic deletion of groups is all that great an idea.
right now, my (and many other people's) fa.human-nets is empty.
A recent message from the moderator of human-nets on the arpanet stated
that human-nets lives, now at brl, and will be sending out again shortly.