Re: dump all articles for given group

(Sorry I've been rather inactive of late. I plead work deadlines, m'lud)

On 14-Mar-2004 Dan Jacobson wrote:
> I want to e.g. grep all the articles in group gmane.linux.hams for a
> certain string, however most of the articles in that group on my
> offline machine are just headers and no bodies. I don't want to
> trigger any requests for bodies.  I just want to dump all the articles
> for that group to stdout. noffle -a doesn't have a way to limit
> actions to just one group.

OK, I can see that rummaging through the message base without triggering
requests is a good thing. A couple of points spring to mind.

Rather than add an argument to dump out a group, would it be better to change
the dump argument to be a regular expression that matches on any header or
body? Kind of a newsbase grep?

Any thoughts on the current dump format? I don't think the current dump is that
useful; it doesn't strike me as terribly easy to, say, create a traditional
news spool from the article dump. Plus thinking about it I wonder if a 'rebuild
newsbase from dump' might come in handy? At the very least the line that
prefixes each article should contain the size of the article so they can be
separated reliably. Hmm. That sounds like a 'rnews' style news batch....

-- 
Jim Hague - [email protected]          Never trust a computer you can't lift.


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