Acbosgd.170 net.news utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!mhtsa!ihnss!cbosg!cbosgd!mark Thu Dec 3 09:28:48 1981 Re: watmath.1128: user numbers Well, whether trt prefers it or not, B netnews has a .newsrc for each user, rather than a .uindex file. The big advantage here is that no matter what horrible thing goes wrong when an article comes in, your .newsrc does not get clobbered. It's also faster when news comes in, since nobody has to go updating the whole .uindex or checking /etc/passwd. Finally, it allows for someone to have read news out of order, keeping certain articles around until later. It probably does take up more disk space - each user has his own file, and each file is bigger than the one liner he had in .uindex. It is probably common for a .newsrc to be bigger than 512 bytes, for people who read lots of newsgroups. On the other hand, people who never read news don't take up any disk space or time at all. And, of course, there is no problem at all for systems with randomly allocated uids, since nobody ever looks at all the uids at once. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.