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Re: ITP: leafnode


On Fri, Apr 02, 2004 at 04:17:16PM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > 
> > 1. Leafnode relies on hard-link counts, so current implementation of hlinks 
> > on FAT32 breaks it. News spool has to be on NTFS, and it seems this will be 
> > an NT/2K/XP only package.
> 
> Is that necessary?  Can't that be ifdef'd for Cygwin?
> 

I've discussed this before with leafnode maintainer, Matthias Andree, and 
here's what he says:

<quote>
The whole /var/spool/news/* organization relies on hard links.

The expire process relies on the hard link count (st_nlink in struct
stat, as in the <sys/stat.h> header file and returned by the stat()
syscall) being correct, file copies on FAT32 will lead to premature expiry 
and a horrible waste of disk space, it may become unbearable for 
cross-posted articles.
</quote>

> > 2. Leafnode requires existence of "news" user and "news" group at runtime.
> > It also requires existence of "root" user with UID 0 at build stage 
> > (specifically during 'make install'). These will result in some editing of
> > /etc/group and /etc/passwd files. 
> 
> Uh, no.  While we want to change the default distro sooner or later to
> have always a root user and group in /etc/passwd and /etc/group, that's
> not going to happen really soon.  Other applications have code fixes to
> accomodate absence of "root", like OpenSSH, ProFTP, Exim, cron...
> 

OK, I can fix this root issue, 'make install' will succeed anyway.

> Requireing an additional "news" account shouldn't do that much harm,
> I guess.
> 

Note that, this will too require some editing because of user and group 
names sharing the same namespace in SAM.



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