Re: [kbuild-devel] Re: CML1 cleanup patch

[kaih@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen)]

Warning: No kernel related stuff inside.

riel@conectiva.com.br (Rik van Riel)  wrote on 26.03.01 in <Pine.LNX.4.21.0103261153510.1863-100000@imladris.rielhome.conectiva>:

> On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, John Cowan wrote:

> > In fact this has come up before: in Usenet software, which has to
> > differentiate between an article and a sub-newsgroup.  An article has
> > to have an all-numeric name, and It Would Have Been Nice if all
> > newsgroup names began with non-digits, but then there was
> > comp.bugs.4bsd.
>
> What's wrong with using the _file type_ for these things ?

Wrong problem description, really. The problem is not components starting  
with digits, the problem is all-numeric components as in alt.2600.

And the problem is that this hits a fast path in the classical news spool  
layout article create path. The code for this assumes that you have  
articles in the range X to Y, and you just got a new article, so you write  
a file called /var/spool/news/group/name/Y+1. You really do not want to  
cope with the possibility of a directory Y+1 existing in that place.

I think there are some other things that also get impacted on their fast  
path, but this is probably the most important.

And then, it's an ugly user interface: the classical spool layout does  
assume that you look at that scpool with Unix tools (like find and grep),  
not only via NNTP and the server.

MfG Kai