Subj : Nodediffs & db:s
To   : Jan Vermeulen
From : Jesper Sörensen
Date : Tue Jan 07 2003 12:44 pm

 JV>     Have you ever done serious work on nodelists?

That depends on what you mean by serious work. I've written several nodelist 
processing tools, including a flag checker, a CC utility (to "mail bomb" all 
downlinks of a *C) and some half working MakeNL clones in both C++ and Java 
(maybe I have some Pascal code left too?). The most recent work I did was to 
write some simple scripts in Awk and Perl to convert the nodelist into SQL and 
XML so I think I know what I need to know about nodelists. Do I pass?

 JV>     The nodelist entries have no line numbers either. Their line
 JV> number is their offset in lines from the start of the list, prolog
 JV> included.

That's what I meant.

 JV>     You get a new diff each week to update last week's nodelist. As
 JV> long as you have kept your records in order (and why shouldn't you?),
 JV> you move them to an auxiliary base record by record, inserting the new
 JV> nodes as per the diff telling you Axx, copying where it says Cxx and
 JV> skipping where it says Dxx. Then kill the old file and rename the new
 JV> one to the old one's name.

It would be interesting to see you actually implementing something like that 
with SQL. Do that before you tell me how easy it is.

 JV>     Easy, ain't it? And that has been invented only eighteen years
 JV> ago. It's just come of age...

I'm not saying that it's difficult if you're only working with files, but I'm 
not.

 js>> If you know of a magic way to convert the nodediffs into SQL
 js>> insert/update/delete commands please tell me how, but if you would
 js>> try this yourself I'm sure you'd see the problem.

 JV>     I'm not going to look backwards, Jesper. All I can add here is to
 JV> advise you to do some serious low-level programming. It's refreshing.

Low level processing of diffs is super simple but that's not what I want to do. 
I want to update the nodelist in my db which I'm using from my Fidonet client 
right now.

 JV>     Do you know there is even elegance in writing assembler?

Almost all kinds of programming have their elegance (well, maybe not VB ;-). 
I've written some assembler (for Motorola 68k and Intel 8088 processors) but 
that was 10-15 years ago. It has its charm but it's not very suitable for 
anything "bigger" if you ask me.

The fact that I nowadays mainly use Java doesn't mean I don't know anything 
about lower level languages. I use Java because I like it and because it's very 
suitable for the kind of software I'm currently developing, not because it's 
the only language I know.

  Jesper,
  yeppe@enjoy.cc
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