Natterings about history files

[bill davidsen]

In article <72wvb2y93y.fsf at nd1.eng.demon.net>,
Alex Kiernan  <alexk at demon.net> wrote:

| ISTM that if you just did a HIScheck you'd keep overviews for articles
| for too long (which I guess isn't a disaster), alternatively we could
| adjust HISlookup to return an expired flag (modifying the TOKEN to
| include an expired flag sounds like a bad idea to me):

  I guess it depends on how often or loudly your users whine when they
get a "not found" to a request in overview. I'm sensitive, I get a lot
of whining about everything, this is one which is visible. I wouldn't
want a lot of overhead to avoid this, but I do think it's desirable to
make it easy to do better. Absent some whole new implementation, I don't
think overview will ever be 100% matched to the article base, but if
your "far too long" means "one expire cycle" rather than "a few
seconds," as I think it might, I would rather get closer than that.

|     enum status { NOTFOUND, FOUND, EXPIRED };
|     enum status HISlookup(struct history *, const char *key, time_t *arrived,
|                           time_t *posted, time_t *expires, TOKEN *token)

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.