First post: How do I rename a newsgroup?

Fri Apr 6 00:07:26 UTC 2001

Michael Coxe skrev:
> 

> >If those are on tradspool, rename in Newsgroups and Xref
> >header for all articles in that group, change group name
> >in active and recreate overview data.  For other storage
> >method, it's not easy.

> Could I get a detailed procedure?

I'll give it a try, but don't do it unless someone else 
confirms. I am very much of a newbie myself and you can't 
trust my suggestions.

1. Shut down INN.

2. Edit db/active and db/newsgroups and change the newsgroups 
   names as you want them.

3. Edit the "Newsgroup: " header of each and every message, so 
   that the new name is substituted for the old one. sed will 
   do this easily, but pay attention in case you have postings 
   containing other postings, like 

     <headers>
     <body>
     Here is the message where you were claiming that the 
     earth is flat:
     (headers-in body)
     (body-in-body)

   You want to change the headers of your postings, but not 
   each and any every occurence of the string 
   "Newsgroups: local.group". I don't know how to get around 
   this problem. 

   Moreover, you need to account for crosspostings, so you 
   will have to remember and put back any possible strings 
   before and after 'local.group'. 

4. Recreate the overview with 'bin/news.daily expireover' .

5. Restart INN.

Or something like this. I had to rename newsgroups myself 
not long ago, and I am using time-hash. I took the roundabout 
way of downloading the entire newsgroups with Eudora, then 
exporting them to files, editing the headers of those files, 
chopping the files into one file per posting (you can have 
the perl script for that from me if you want), removing the 
original newsgroups from INN, accepting the new newsgroups, 
and finally injecting all the edited messages "back" into 
the new newsgroups with rnews. It worked fine, except that 
I started the scripts at the end of a day and they were 
ready sometime before lunch the next day. 

Z   

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