🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sunday, in article <830682895snz@wbriscoe.demon.co.uk>
     walter@wbriscoe.demon.co.uk "walter briscoe" wrote:

wb> Renumbering of articles - required where an earlier article is kept and
wb> a later one deleted currently requires renumbering of those later
wb> articles.

It requires renumbering some.  Not necessarily the later ones.
Your choice.

  > What is the advantage of requiring the article sequence to be
wb> monotonic.  ACTIVE contains 2 numbers which describe the sequence.  I

I think you mean 'consecutive', not just monotonic.

wb> can see that it is necessary for one of those numbers to describe the
wb> last number used - this allows the next number to be assigned.
wb> Currently the other number is one less than the minimum article number.
wb> Does it need to have this logic?

Not if you rewrite Snews.  ;-)

<shrug>  It's a design decision.  Personally I prefer to go
with the flow, rather than fight it.

If you came up with a pressing reason to change, it would
probably be advisable to make the change over several
releases, first making all Snews programs accept but not
generate such newsbases, and later the full works.  That
way, users could go back to a previous version without
sweat.

You might even want to change the name at the same time,
e.g. SCNews (Slightly Complicated News).  ;-)

wb> IDX files.  The consistency check that it allows would disappear. e.g.
wb>     expire: In alt.msdos.programmers article 25 found when 28 expected
wb> The sequence could be checked as increasing and discrepancies between
wb> active and the idx files could still be noted.

So some discrepancies would no longer be detectable.
(But perhaps they would be unlikely.)

wb> I have added a check to deal with snzprune actions.  If the first
wb> article to be kept is older than the expiry time and a prune action is
wb> pending for that group, expiry is not done on that group and the user is
wb> given an explanation and the relevant command. e.g.
wb>     expire: For alt.msdos.programmers, first do: snzprune altmsdp

As long as Expire continues not to change article numbers
I don't see why that would be needed.

wb> I have been thinking about the mechanism used to protect articles
wb> against deletion by expire.  Keeping unread articles is one mechanism.
wb> I wonder if marking articles as protected by negative inversion of their
wb> times would do the job.  This would require mechanisms in SNEWS.EXE to
wb> invert the protection on a message and to show that messages were
wb> protected.  The action of EXPIRE of making times a non-decreasing
wb> sequence would also have to go.

Again, such trickery would have to be phased in over several
releases.  Whereas having a .kee file with msg ids, and an
updated Prune that could expire as well as respect dels/keeps
could be introduced as soon as Snews could generate .kee
files (which is almost trivial).  That's what I'm working
on, anyhow.  Mark Rogers suggested calling it "Son of Prune",
or Fig, which I found rather appealing!

I think an Expire which does little more than the present
one, but is fast and rock solid, and can be released soon
is highly desirable and will get an ecstatic reception.
And I think that's pretty much what you've already done.
I'm worried you're now trying to gild the lily.

--
John Washington