C News fix for unstalled batching

[Henry Spencer]

In article <25605C32.28948 at ateng.com> chip at ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
>One of the sites that we feed hasn't been keeping up with their batches.
>In fact, they've fallen so far behind that entire batches that should be
>100K are empty because all the articles in them have expired.
>Unfortunately, the C News sendbatches program doesn't notice when an
>outgoing batch is empty...
>I hope this patch will meet with the approval of the C News Cabal -- er,
>authors...

I'd be happier about it if it didn't involve running every batch through
a temporary file.  This can be a noticeable performance hit, and *most*
of the time it's unnecessary.

I would recommend Chip's solution as an interim measure for sites with
serious problems of this type.  I've got a more elegant solution sketched
out, but it will take a bit of work and won't appear immediately.
-- 
A bit of tolerance is worth a  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
megabyte of flaming.           | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu