🚀 go-pugleaf

John Washington (john@wash.demon.co.uk) wrote:
> On Sunday, in article <818613360.3018@thokk.demon.co.uk>
>      Malcolm@demon.net "Malcolm Muir" wrote:

> MM> John Washington (john@wash.demon.co.uk) wrote:
> MM> 
> ..
> MM> > ..., and SnzPrune is the result.
> MM> 
> MM> A pedant of course has to point out that SnzPrune does corrupt the
> MM> database in the process of deletion :)
> MM> 
> MM> The fact that the resulting corruption (the renumbering of articles)
> MM> is not noticed by the majority of users is key here.

> Lightheartedly, but pedantically, I have to point out that,
> in the absence of a document describing the format of the
> database, and stating that article numbers are a constant,
> SnzPrune certainly does NOT corrupt the database.

As you say, lighthartedly, I have no wish to get into a deep
discussion here !

> I'm unaware of even a non-zero minority who suffer from
> this, but if a utility exists that depends upon that undocumented
> behaviour of Snews, I'll be glad to work with its author.
> As you already know this, Malcolm, I do take your comments
> in the spirit I know they were intended, but you'll well
> understand my caution at this time, since there's a certain
> amount of flak going around here at present.  :-)

I have received email telling me of such. As far as I know no one
using our version of Snews uses the article numbers from the
database.

The fact that some aspect of the database are undocumented are no
different to the fact that Access database format is undocumented.

> If you still do think this counts as corruption,
> consider a user who saves some batch.txt files,
> rmgroup's a newsgroup, and then unbatches a selection of
> his files.  Has he corrupted the database, in your
> opinion?

Unbatch is designed to cater for articles that are not in the main
newsbase. It handles then by placing them in junk. This is the case
regardless of rmgroup'ing a newsgroup. The database is not corrupted
by this action.

> Yes:  Snews' own utilities corrupt its database.

No it does not.

> No: SnzPrune's actions are conceptually no different
> from that scenario.

I beg to disagree. Snews consistantly assigns an article number to an
article and this association is not broken unless the newsgroup is
'rmgroup'ed. Rmgroup is a deliberate act of deleting the data for a
newsgroup in its entirity.

-- 
Malcolm S. Muir
Sunderland
England