Recompiling News 2.11 with dbm routines using gcc1.34

[Lenny Tropiano]

After getting over 12.3MB of compressed news to unbatch in two days, and
my two hard drives on my UNIX pc chattering 48 hours continuously, I decided
to try to recompile my news, and hopefully optimizing the new unbatching.

I've noticed since I have the 3 weeks worth of history files (non-DBM compiled)
on one hard drive, and my news spool directory on the other drive, that all
the disk I/O is really the searching of the history/[0-9] files, and a 
minimal amount is placing the unbatched/uncompressed file in the news spool
directory tree.

Figuring I would recompile news (something I don't care to do much), I thought
I would add the 3 patches that came over sometime in January to bring my
news to the 2.11.17 patchlevel.  Going even one step further, adding some
public domain dbm routines (mdbm), and compiling it with the super optimization
of the current gcc1.34.   Firstly, am I taking on more than I should at
once?  I really don't want to *BREAK* anything, especially since I feed a
few sites, and do get a lot of news fed to me.

Can someone give me a few pointers on how to go through an easy transition
from non-gcc compiled, non-DBM news (2.11.14) to gcc compiled, dbm news 
software (2.11.17)?  I know this is a big question ... but even a few pointers
on experiences with dbm-routines (which I have no experience with), how
to convert the old history (news already unbatched on the system) to 
a dbm-history file (does expire -R do this)?

Furthermore, if anyone has tried this on an AT&T UNIX PC (probably unlikely),
I'd be interested in hearing from you... Thanks again,

-Lenny
-- 
Lenny Tropiano             ICUS Software Systems         [w] +1 (516) 582-5525
lenny at icus.islp.ny.us      Telex; 154232428 ICUS         [h] +1 (516) 968-8576
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