🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <19990715.1824.42248snz@wash.demon.co.uk>
           john$@wash.demon.co.uk "John Washington" writes:

>I had a small amount of mail on this topic, so it may be easier
>to clarify it publicly.  Since the following is entirely from
>memory, without checking the code, consider all my statements
>to be prefaced with "I believe".  Contradictions welcome.
>
>The problem that arises on & after 9 Sept 2001 is due to
>Snews keeping track of time with some count of seconds
>(millisecs?) since 1980 (1970?) and storing it in a fixed-
>format record.  At present this count is 9 digits, but
>will change to 10 just over a couple of years hence.
>There's a number of places where this is used, e.g. in
>creating some message IDs, but since these are free-format
>they will present no problem.
>
>However, the index file for each newsgroup is made up of
>fixed-format records and the count is stored in them at
>offset 28.  This is the only problem.  Ka9q doesn't have any
>such problem.  DIS?  Anyone capable of reading the source of
>DIS is unlikely to do it for free, as Chris recently said.
>PcElm, <shrug> <oi vay>.  No source, no comment.

You are, of course correct, this will possibly hit the OS/2 version of
SNEWS depending how it was converted.

>So the first job is to decide on a new format for the index
>files.  Then a cunning plan is needed that will assist users
>in migrating to the new format.  And an even more cunning
>plan to prevent users regressing to an earlier version of
>Snews-related programs and turning their newsbases into
>mashed turnips.  At this point it will become clear that
>the new format conflicts with the cunning plans, and new
>format Mk 2 will be designed.
>
>And finally, turning the cunning plans into code in Snews,
>Expire, Unbatch, Reindex, etc should be relatively trivial.
>Not forgetting mail2snz and prune, of course.

Oh dear I really like Snews in OS/2.

demon.ip.support.os2 added

{R}