Re: How to reclaim space in news.dat?

Yngvar Folling (yngvar.folling@login.eunet.no)
Tue, 31 Dec 1996 16:07:15 +0100 (MET)

In article <UiwwyoJPMuBb090yn@wizvax.wizvax.net>,
mrhuey@wizvax.net (Ramsay D. Seielstad) wrote:

> The more I think about it, the more I think Chin should re-think the
> rebuild -s option to either leave the expirey date as is when you rebuild
> or let you specify to reset it.

The more I think about it, the more I think there are some mis-
conceptions going around about what rebuild -s is for. It is *not* to
shrink the news.dat file. The help screen for rebuild says quite
clearly that it is to reconstruct the file if it has been corrupted, and
should *only* be run then. The shrinking is just a side effect.

I would want a way to get rid of the holes in the news.dat file, but
Yarn hasn't got a good, documented way to do that yet. The file *does*
shrink eventually, so that there at least is no free space at the *end*
of the file. However, I am under the distinct impression that Yarn
imports new messages in the *last* free blocks instead of the *first*.
I can see the text of messages that expired months ago at the beginning
of the file, and yet I see my new messages at the end. I really hope
that Chin changes this, so that news.dat would naturally shrink much
faster than it does now.

Yngvar