Re: Shrinking NEWS.DAT?
JC (w2jc@ritz.mordor.com)
Sat, 03 Aug 1996 17:50:54 -0400
Yngvar Folling wrote:
>
> If first fit *is* used, of course I'm satisfied. I'm just a bit
> suspicious about how slowly NEWS.DAT shrinks. I don't like EXPIRE -r,
> because when reading a followup I frequently find myself wanting to read
> the original message. I see that as some of the *purpose* of using a
> database reader like Yarn rather than a packet reader. And of course it
> wrecks the message tree that Chin made for version 0.91.
Wish I had time to program it myself, but I envision a utility
that would "repack" the news.dat file... sort of like 'defrag'
works on a disk. Since the yarn system has indexes indication which
news articles are present and where they are, it would seem that
it wouldn't be too much of a problem to start at the beginning and
at the first free space find an article that will fit, move it into
the free space, remove it from its upper space, and change the pointers.
Am I way off?