Re: New slrn maintainer
Maarten Boekhold writes ("New slrn maintainer"):
...
> For making start-up faster, slrn wants to have a newsgroup-description
> file locally. It can use a system-wide file for this to save space. To
> keep this current, it has to be updated once in a while.
>
> What is a sane location for this file? /var/lib/slrn/newsgroup.dsc ?
That's a fairly sane location.
> Another related Q: would it be OK to put a script in /etc/cron.weekly
> that fetches this list? (ofcourse the machine has to be connected to the
> net then).
That would be acceptable, I think. Better, though, would be to wrap
slrn in a script that fetches the file in the background if it's older
than a week (say) when slrn is started. Don't forget:
- you'll need a setuid C or Perl program to do this properly. It
needs to be setgid to news, but no more than that (if /var/lib/slrn
is group-writeable by news).
- download to a temporary file in the same directory and then install
it using mv(1) or rename(2), so that failed downloads don't corrupt
the local copy;
- add a cron job to clean out old temporary files.
Ian.
> Sincerely yours,
>
> Maarten
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
> | Maarten Boekhold, Faculty of Electrical Engineering TU Delft, NL |
> | boekhold@cindy.et.tudelft.nl boekhold@gopher.library.tudelft.nl |
> | Take life as a party! |
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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