Sun Microsystems Sun Workstation 100U System Manager's Manual page 388

Differences between Version 2.9 and 2.10
USENET Installation and Maintenance
order as active, and a "last found" pointer is used to reduce the find time algorithm from
quadratic complexity (on the number
01
newsgroups) to linear complexity. This makes the
total number of newsgroups less of a factor in determining speed, and also keeps everyone's
.newlre cleaned out. It is important that people not store extra junk in their . Rew.re,
because it will be deleted when they run readnew •.
New Hashed History
The method used to determine if an incoming article has already been seen locally has been
changed. On V7 systems, profiling showed that rnew. spent about hall of its time in 1gets
reading the history file. It now uses the dbm(3) library to hash the message ID of each arti-
cle. To avoid incompatibilities between 2.9 and 2.10, if you have more than one incoming
news feed, run the provided evt.hilt program (see the Converlion section lor the script),
which will enter all the message ID's from your 2.9 format history file into the hashed data-
base. The text history file is maintained as it was in 2.9, for human use.
New Message Header Format
Message headers now meet the USENET format standard. and RFC822. Headers stored
will look verbose, and contain much more information. Headers transmitted to other sys-
tems will work with old B news systems or new ones. The format of dates has been
changed to conform to RFC822.
New U ser Interface
The user interface is roughly compatible, but you will notice a few dilerences, and there are
a few extensions. One major difference is that poltnew. now prompts for a "Distribution".
This defaults to the same as the newsgroup (and is omitted in this case), but allows you to
conveniently enter a Distribution header line (and makes you think twice about where your
message is going to). Any newsgroup name(s) can be typed here, but one normally types
either nothing or a class distribution ("net" , "btl", "nj", or "world" , for example), restrict-
ing the distribution to that class of sites.
A more minor change: headers are now displayed in a format which is more compact, but
more information is displayed than before. If you want to see the article ID or full path, or
the date or newsgroups, use the h command for a display. The H command can be used for
a full, verbose header dump.
Changed Control Messages
Control messages are slightly different. In particular, 2.10 now requires that a newsgroup be
created with a newgroup control message (generated by inew. -0) before it can be used. If
an incoming article is in some newsgroup that is not in the local active file, the article will
be stored locally in newsgroup junk and not forwarded to other systems. This will prevent
the accidental creation of typographical errors by systems running older versions of news.
Also, the rmgroup control message has been made less dangerous. When an rmgroup mes-
sage comes around, you will be sent mail asking you to remove the group, but the group
w ill not actually be removed. This prevents someone from accidently or deliberately remov-
ing an important newsgroup such as net.general.
• Document available rrom Sun Microsystems:
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USENET Mell.gel, part
number 800-1097·01.
8
7 January 1984