Re: Yarn and GUI news/mail

From: Arnoud (galactus@stack.nl)
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 19:08:50 +0200

In article <199806100710.AAA04445@ shell1.ncal.verio.com>,
Howard Schwartz <theo@ncal.verio.com> wrote:
> Frank G. Pitt wrote:
>
> > What I often want to be able to do is, while editing, go and look at
> > another article or email. That's what a GUI gets you.
>
> Can you do this by running 2 instances of yarn, within a multi-tasking
> OS -- for instance, 2 yarns in 2 dos boxes within windows, or 2 yarns
> using Dr. DOS or Open DOS's multi-tasker? Or is yarn's memory management
> too dumb to prevent stored data from running into each other?

It's not the memory management, it's the file management that is the
problem. Yarn uses several overview files to keep track of the news
database, and two instances could be updating this file at the same
time, which corrupts it.

Of course it would be possible to adapt Yarn so that it could work
around this (lockfiles, flock() and cousins, etc) but right now it
simply doesn't do that.

-- 
\/  Arnoud "Galactus" Engelfriet - galactus@stack.nl              This space
    5th year Business & Computing Science student                 left blank
    URL: http://www.stack.nl/~galactus/  PGP: 0x461A1A35      intentionally.