install problems with B news

[David C Lawrence]

In article <932 at becker.UUCP> news at becker.UUCP (Bruce Becker) writes:
Bruce> I'm running (for the moment) B news 2.11, patchlevel 14.
Bruce> 
Bruce> For some reason, I've been getting the following message
Bruce> several times in the news log right after expire has run -
Bruce> 
Bruce> 	Cannot install </usr/spool/news/...>: File exists
Bruce> 
Bruce> where "..." is some news article pathname.

In <980 at icus.islp.ny.us> lenny at icus.islp.ny.us (Lenny Tropiano) said:
Lenny> What probably happened is you got the article again, and it
Lenny> found the same file name.  The other thing might be is the
Lenny> "seq" file is wrong.  

It really doesn't matter whether the article was the same one or not;
the file names for an article is not determined by either the article
or by the seq file.  Normally it would be determined by the maximum
number listed in the active file entry for the group in which the
article gets filed.  For example, this article will probably be filed
in /usenet/spool/news/software/b/1472 on rpi.edu, with a symbolic link
from /usenet/spool/unix-pc/general/1821, because of the following
active file entries:

news.software.b 0000001471 0000001151 y
unix-pc.general 0000001820 0000001604 y

It seems as though Bruce's expire run is not correctly updating the
active file.

Incidentally, the seq file is used by B News to get incremental, unique
message-ids for postings on a machine.  I should get around to munging
C News to do that someday.

Dave
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