2.5 wish list (was Re: pre-2.4 (was Re: buffindexed jumbo patch) )

[Russ Allbery]

Alex Kiernan <alexk at demon.net> writes:

> Whilst we're talking about innd looping over groups, could we consider
> changing the API so that innd gets a cancel it pulls out the original
> article and passes the pieces into the overview database in a similar
> way, rather than passing in the TOKEN (which none of the implementations
> implement AFAICR)

The only thing I was worried about with this was the speed hit and
complexity of parsing the Xref header out of the article.  (It would be
*so* nice to store newsgroup and article number information with the
article in a machine-readable form rather than only as an Xref header in
the article; the parsing would be so much easier.)

But cancels are an uncommon case, and after all we used to pull up the
article and compare From and Sender and whatnot, so it would probably be
fine.  Yes, I think this is a good idea.

Note that if we can do this, expire becomes *much* faster.  The only
reason why expire currently has to walk through *all* of the articles in
the spool and check their existence is because of cancels.  If innd always
notifies overview of cancels, there's no need to stat every article during
expire unless the user specifically requests it (because they've deleted
articles manually or something), which takes away the part that makes
expire take the longest.

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

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