(Partial) result of LIST OVERVIEW.FMT?

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Thu Sep 4 22:07:36 UTC 2008


Julien ÉLIE <julien at trigofacile.com> writes:

> Does anyone know how it can be handled?
>
> Do we have to save somewhere (in <pathoverview>?) the contents and the
> time of the last modification of overview.fmt and compare it at each
> reload?  Then, when LIST OVERVIEW.FMT is called, we have to compare a
> lot of things and a few issues can arise.  For instance if we have two
> (or more!) consecutive modifications of overview.fmt with no posted
> messages between both of them (or we can even imagine that they are all
> cancelled some time after), etc.  I do not see well how I can be sure
> that the database is consistent for *all* the articles...

I think we have to make the news administrator handle this.

overview.fmt for one shouldn't be a separate configuration file.  I'd been
planning, but never got around to, making it instead a list parameter in
inn.conf using the new configuration syntax; in other words, something
like:

extraoverview: [ xref, newsgroups ]

(note the absence of the mandatory fields; there's no reason to make
people list them in the configuration).

If we had two configuration parameters, one that lists the fields saved to
overview and the other listing what to advertise, a news administrator
could do the right thing.

It's a lot harder to figure this out automatically inside INN.  You could
assume that any changes to the list of extra fields aren't consistent
until all of overview has been rebuilt, I suppose....

> Too bad for "Xref:full" which disappears...  But I do not see how we
> can be sure this field is consistent.  Any idea?

INN requires Xref:full be part of the overview and has for quite some time
(since the storage API introduction, so a complete overview rebuild has
been required on upgrade since then), so we can be certain that it's
always there.

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

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
     <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.


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