B news 2.11 patch 18 considered harmful

[Gary S. Trujillo]

Recently, the following was posted:

|Path: gnosys!spdcc!bloom-beacon!shelby!mcnc!gatech!emory!skeeve!arnold
|From: arnold at skeeve.UUCP (Arnold D. Robbins)
|Newsgroups: unix-pc.sources
|Subject: Patch #18 to B News 2.11
|Message-ID: <253 at skeeve.UUCP>
|Date: 17 Sep 89 04:08:30 GMT
|Distribution: unix-pc
|Organization: The Basement Computer, Atlanta GA
|Lines: 2254
|
|Well, believe it or not, B News is NOT dead! (Merely on heavy life support.)
|Despite the release of C News and the imminent release of B News 3.0
|(TMN-Netnews), Rick Adams has released the following patch to B News.
|
|Skeeve is still at 2.11.14.  I haven't decide yet which news I'm going
|to switch to, or when.  At the moment, it ain't broke so I ain't fixing it.
|-------------------------------
|Path: emory!gatech!udel!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!rick
|From: rick at uunet.UU.NET (Rick Adams)
|Newsgroups: news.software.b
|Subject: patch 18 for B news 2.11
|Message-ID: <67503 at uunet.UU.NET>
|Date: 12 Sep 89 23:10:59 GMT
|Organization: UUNET Communications Services, Falls Church, VA
|Lines: 2232
|
|Description:
|	This is patch 18 for news 2.11. It addresses the following problems:
|
|	Small changes to work around various compiler bugs.
|	fixed batch to return to BATCHDIR before renaming work file.
|	checkgroups no longer mails you a message if everything's ok
|	Fixed active file to handle a maximum  of 9,999,999 messages
|		to avoid wraparound problem at current 99,999...

Well, I naively patched my sources, which were at patchlevel 17, and got
a very corrupted situation in my /usr/spool/news/* directories.  Here's
the sort of thing I found:

   2 -rw-r--r--  2 news       1022 Oct  3 15:34 41414 
   5 -rw-r--r--  1 news       2093 Oct  3 15:33 414 
   3 -rw-r--r--  1 news       1330 Oct  3 15:33 4 
   4 -rw-r--r--  1 news       1580 Oct  3 15:33 31414 
   3 -rw-r--r--  1 news       1490 Oct  3 15:33 314 
   2 -rw-r--r--  1 news        808 Oct  3 15:33 3 
   2 -rw-r--r--  1 news        530 Oct  3 15:33 21414 
   2 -rw-r--r--  3 news        958 Oct  3 15:32 214 
   2 -rw-r--r--  1 news        704 Oct  3 15:32 2 
   4 -rw-r--r--  1 news       1651 Oct  3 15:31 5714 

D'ya see a pattern??  Looks like it's taking the last two digits of the last
valid article filename, and plays games with them. Worse yet, rn goes crazy
when there's such a wide article-sequence spread (runs out of memory on my
2 meg machine, in fact).

Here's what we find in /usr/lib/news/errlog:

Oct  3 15:32	<1989Oct2.175907.8836 at alberta.uucp>	inews: found bad ngsize 359695 ng misc.jobs.misc, setting to 1
Oct  3 15:32	<195 at temvax.UUCP>	inews: found bad ngsize 292827 ng misc.jobs.offered, setting to 1
Oct  3 15:33	<Oct.2.17.13.00.1989.27704 at topaz.rutgers.edu>	inews: found bad ngsize 2969695 ng misc.jobs.misc, setting to 1
Oct  3 15:33	<4826 at cps3xx.UUCP>	inews: found bad ngsize 2141413 ng comp.unix.xenix, setting to 1
Oct  3 15:33	<ROB.89Oct2163903 at violet.berkeley.edu>	inews: found bad ngsize 2434342 ng soc.men, setting to 1
Oct  3 15:33	<ROB.89Oct2163903 at violet.berkeley.edu>	inews: found bad ngsize 3969695 ng misc.jobs.misc, setting to 1
Oct  3 15:33	<37 at gutarman.UUCP>	inews: found bad ngsize 3141413 ng comp.unix.xenix, setting to 1
Oct  3 15:34	<216 at hutch.UUCP>	inews: found bad ngsize 4969695 ng misc.jobs.misc, setting to 1
Oct  3 15:34	<334 at mlfarm.UUCP>	inews: found bad ngsize 4141413 ng comp.unix.xenix, setting to 1
Oct  3 15:35	<13915 at well.UUCP>	inews: found bad ngsize 2282827 ng misc.jobs.offered, setting to 1


I have promptly fallen back to patchlevel 17!

-- 
Gary S. Trujillo			      gst at gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts		      {wjh12,spdcc,ima,cdp}!gnosys!gst