Natterings about history files

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Sat Mar 3 11:32:04 UTC 2001


Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> writes:
> On 24 Feb 2001, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> Oh, BTW, note that for a transit-only server you don't need to store
>> *any* information about articles in history other than the fact that
>> you've seen the message ID.  You don't have to support article
>> retrieval at all, so it's okay for articles to be identified solely by
>> storage token.  That simplifies the history file issues dramatically.

> This seems to go opposite the idea of a clean history API, doesn't it?

No.  If you're a transit-only server, you use a history backend that only
implements HISremember and not HISstore (or whatever we call them).  It's
still the same API; you're just allowing for specialized backends that
only partially implement it and would return errors to callers that tried
to exercise the unimplemented functionality.

(That's a good reason for keeping two separate entry points, one for just
message IDs and one for message IDs with a storage token.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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