This is not the case in this situation. The "Assertion" failure is
happening because an offset stored in the history.pag is pointing to a
bogus location in the news.dat. The integrity of the news.dat (in every
case i've seen so far) is just fine -- but history.pag contains bogus
pointers... that is why rebuild -h will fix the problem (rebuild -h) does
not modify the news.dat at all, just rebuilds the history.* files.
>your error messages would be simple enough to be clear to joe user
>but also provide enough info that someone with a good hex editor,
Irony of Ironies! I just broke down and wrote Chin asking him if he could
provide more detail in his error messages so i could go in and try to
figure out what is happening! Here I am guilty of the same thing! <-:
>some understanding of yarn's files, and a little daring could take
>a stab at fixing things manually.
Believe me if i could think of any way to "fix things manually" i'd program
it to fix automatically right in yarnpack! (-: I still don't even know what
could be causing the problem.
There is actually (in the circumstance we've been discussing) no extra data
that Yarnpack can give that can't be got elsewhere. The "unsynced" history
error for example. All it means is that Yarnpack has counted the number of
messages in the newsdat, and the number of message ID's in the history.pag
and they don't match. Yarnpack doesn't know much more than that! You can
see the number of MSG ID's yarnpack counts in the message it gives. You can
see the actual number of articles in the newsdat by running NNIGN...
It's well beyond the scope of Yarnpack (which is just a hack) to be more
specific in this circumstance... at least at this time.
> By the way, would you make your source code available (at least to
>me)? I have tried to phathom the format of the history files with
Actually, i virtually always include my source code (as useless, messy and
obscure, as it may be), but i simply forgot to put it in the yarnpack
archive! I realised i'd forgotten a day or so later after posting the
thing... i added it then... so if you go get another copy there is source
in it... but i doubt it will do you much good. it's pascal. I will be
sorting all this out when i get my web site move all sorted out... sigh..
--
_____________________________________________________________________
Tim Muddletan =-=-=- with love and squalor -=-=-= as544 torfree.net
-=- find and read A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole -=-
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