Bug - makehistory causes crossposted articles to disappear

[Jordan Russell]

OS: Red Hat Linux 7.0 / 2.2.18 kernel
INN version: 2.3.1 and STABLE-20010208
Spool method: tradspool, with crossposted articles hard-linked
Overview method: tradindexed

Hi,

I run a public news server at news.jrsoftware.org which contains 7
newsgroups, each starting with "jrsoftware". The problem is that following a
makehistory, certain crossposted articles disappear from one of my
newsgroups -- jrsoftware.toolbar2000.

Here is how I can reproduce the (apparent) bug:

1. I crosspost to jrsoftware.innosetup,jrsoftware.toolbar2000

2. I go to jrsoftware.innosetup. Article is there. Good.

3. I go to jrsoftware.toolbar2000. Article is there. Good.

4. I rebuild the history using these commands:

cd /var/lib/news
rm -f /var/lib/news/history*
rm -rf /var/spool/news/overview/*
makehistory -O -e -f history.n -l 600000
makedbz -s `wc -l <history.n` -f history.n
mv history.n history
mv history.n.dir history.dir
mv history.n.hash history.hash
mv history.n.index history.index

5. I go to jrsoftware.innosetup. Article is there. Good.

6. I go to jrsoftware.toolbar2000. Article has disappeared. Bad.

By "disappear" I mean that the article number does not show up in an XOVER
command, and is unrecognized by an ARTICLE command. However, the article is
definitely still out there -- it's in the spool directory and is listed in
overview/j/t/jrsoftware.toolbar2000.DAT. INN just acts like it doesn't
exist.

The strange part is that if I reverse the order of the newsgroups in step #1
(i.e. make it jrsoftware.toolbar2000,jrsoftware.innosetup), then the article
does not disappear from either group following a makehistory.

So I believe this is a bug in makehistory. No legitimately posted articles
should disappear like that, right? I have tested this many times and had the
same results, so it is not a one-time fluke.

If it would be helpful in debugging, I can provide all of my config files
and my entire spool (~4MB tar.gz'ed).

Alternatively you can visit my news server at news.jrsoftware.org and see
the bug in action. Go to the jrsoftware.innosetup newsgroup and see the 4
posts that start with "test cp". Notice how the "test cp 2d" and "test cp
2f" posts are visible in jrsoftware.innosetup but not in
jrsoftware.toolbar2000, even though they are crossposted to
jrsoftware.toolbar2000. (They were visible in jrsoftware.toolbar2000 until I
did a makehistory.)

Thanks for your time.

Jordan Russell