readnews questions

[Dave Martindale]

The U command itself takes almost no time.  But finding the first article
in the next group may take a long time indeed if it is a group you haven't
been reading regularly.  Readnews looks for articles in ascending sequence
one at a time.  If the next group is net.unix-wizards and the first unexpired
article on your machine is number 5000, and you haven't read anything in
this group before, it will look for article 1, then 2, then 3, until it
finally gets to 5000.  You may wait a long time.

A quick-and-dirty fix is to grep unix-wizards in /usr/lib/news/active;
the number is the highest-received article to date; say it's 6000.
Then find the unix-wizards line in your .newsrc and alter it to read

	net.unix-wizards: 1-5900

Ugh.  I believe someone posted some code to deal with this, but we don't
have it installed here either.  A reasonable way to handle this is to have
readnews read the directory, build a bit map of articles which do exist,
invert the map to become a set of articles which don't exist, and then
or this into the bit map obtained from the user's .newsrc so that all
the non-existent articles appear to have been read.  I don't have time
to implement it though.

	Dave Martindale