Well this is *really* scary. If anyone wants to try this i can't strongly
enough advise backing up your news.dat and history.pag first... in fact
just to be safe backup your entire %HOME%\YARN\* and %YARN%\* with
subdirectories. (-: In fact backup your entire hard drives. Then backup the
backups, in case one of the backups goes bad. You can't be too safe!!
(-;
I have finally hacked together a pack-in-place program for the Yarn
news.dat... which, of course, also doesn't reset the import dates.
Some dire warnings:
* Chin has never given out (in public, or to me) the format for
the "history.*" files. I had to figure it out for myself. And
I haven't managed to figure it ALL out -- but *think* i have
figured it out enough to be able to patch it -- so far...
at least my program is working here, so far... (-:
* My "supersed.pag" file is always blank. It contains only 2048
null characters (0). So i haven't been able to figure out
if it also stores news.dat offsets -- therefore my program
at this time does not touch the supersed.pag file -- your
supersed.pag file is not 'blank' it is quite possible that
my program will put it out of sync with the news.dat file...
therefor DO NOT run my program... don't risk it. If someone
has a supersed.pag file that isn't completely blank, send it
to me so i can examine it... (archive both history.pag
and supersed.pag and f/a the archive to me)
(Hey Chin, if you are reading this and getting more and more terrified by
the word that I'm going to mess up all the Yarn/2 users, how about tossing
me a few clues. heheh.)
So far i've only done an OS/2 version (but before all you DOSers groan and
possibly go out and do something desperate (like install OS/2! <G>) i have
programmed it in such a way that it shouldn't be too hard to modify for a
dos version... in the future... if it proves to work...).
If any of you OS/2ers want to risk this...
http://www.io.org/~tm/files/yarnpack.exe
First backup everything! Then simply run the thing. There are no switches.
As i said, it's a "pack-in-place", so no extra drive space is needed --
except to make a backup first!
The yarnpack program has been quickly thrown together, so doesn't have a
whole lot of error checking. It could potentially screw your news pretty
good if you run it on a corrupted news.dat or history.pag file -- but
basically if expire and nnign both work for you without complaining you
should be in good shape, I think.
I'm a little nervous about this program. As i said, it's very kludgy. And
i'm working quite a bit in the dark -- not knowing all of yarn's structures
FOR SURE... or what files exactly do what... but as I also have said, it
works here, so far... i've tried it on several different news.dats ... so
far so good...
SO, if anyone out there gives it a try Please Please let me know... let me
know, of course, if there was some horrible problem and you have put out a
hit on me... but also let me know if it WORKED as well! Just so I can
confirm for myself that it generally works. <-: And then maybe i'll patch
it up for DOS. And also optimise it generally. It could be a bit faster...
Or fix it, if it didn't work.
Ok... on to my next gross hack job...
--
.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.
Tim Muddleten =As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning= as544 torfree.net
-=-=-= begging you to read Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis =-=-=-
`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~`'~
Yarn/2 Bells & Whistles Page: http://www.io.org/~tm/bells2.html
* January 2nd * International Day of Greek Tragedies