[....stuff deleted....]
>It's called subtlety. Chin Huang works very hard to produce an excellent
>product. He does it without payment (though I'll gladly pay when he
>gets around to requesting). I am trying to gently point him in the
>direction of resolving an issue that affects a percentage of his
>user base. The new database is fine, I (and I have noted at least one
>other user) need a way to reclaim dead space in the new database
>structure. My NEWS files run between 50 and 450 megs depending on the
>time of year and open projects I am working on. Right now I am
>whittling it down from its' 350 meg high watermark. That's all, products
>are often used in ways the author didn't necessarily foresee when the
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^-prefer??
>program originaly was written. Subtle features become important.
I also have to put my throw in my 2 cents here - I have what I think
is a valid use for both Expire -o & -r. So, does that mean that part
of me is modern & the other part a BBS die-hard? :-) [BTW, When I
was on a BBS I used another excellent database reader- RoboMail]
I use -o only occasionally and then only on selected newsgroups that I
read & keep for fairly short periods of time. The '-r- groups are ones
like this one, Win95, hardware, etc. The kind of things that I don't
feel any need to have info on hand for long periods of time.
OTOH, I am diabetic and have the last 6-7 months of msgs in a diabetic
newsgroups & mailing list, plus a couple of others that I keep as a
kind of 'database' of information. To me that's one of the primary
reasons I have used Yarn for so long - (that & the great text search
features). Shouldn't a database type reader be able to be used as a
database?
I recently expired about 50 MB (in a 116 MB file) and shrunk my
news.dat file by only 300 kb - because some of my long-term
newsgroup/mailing list msgs were on the end of the file.
I do like the faster Expire -r - but I usually run that stuff in the
background or when I'm in the shower anyway, so I don't really care
how long they take. I also really like the fact that my HD doesn't get
15-20% fragmented every 2-4 days as it did with all pre-.9x versions!
[Except for my new WD 1.6 GB HD - my 2nd one just developed 4 MB of
bad sectors last week!!!!] ^^^
What I would like to see is (simply??) a little program that would
simply repack my database, re-indexing (or whatever Yarn does) AND
reusing the empty space for the long-term storage groups.... Oh, and I
don't want it resetting any Keep dates. I won't run rebuild unless
forced to. Maybe a separate utility, if Chin wouldn't mind and
someone would take up the challenge?
Sorry about the length... I do that.
***************************************************************
saw@exo.com (Steve Wright) <-> Orange, CA
Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I
think I've forgotten this before. -- Steven Wright