The .NA header promises information on "Clients which communicate well
with the Empire4 Server". The page doesn't really deliver. It talks
about client support for asynchronous notifications. It stopped
listing separate client projects in 4.0.7 (1997). Not mentioning such
clients isn't just outdated, it's actively misleading.
Perhaps an up-to-date info page on clients would be useful, but I
can't write one right now. Delete.
Loses a bit of information for client developers that was tacked on in
4.0.7: pointers to dump commands, and an explanation of timestamps. I
trust client writers can find "info xdump" without this.
Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@pond.sub.org>
Member nws_uid is unused since the commit before previous. Remove it.
Member nws_seqno is of marginal value, because we write news only
through ncache[], and thus aren't prone to the errors sequence numbers
can catch. Remove it.
Make timestamp selector virtual, computing nws_when + nws_duration,
and remove member nws_timestamp. Impact:
* In ncache(), the removed timestamp equals nws_when + nws_duration,
both for new news and updated news. No change.
* delete_old_news() becomes invisible. Before, its move of unexpired
news to the beginning of the news file touched all the timestamps.
That was unwanted, because the move does not change news, only their
storage. Improvement.
* empdump no longer flags the imported news changed via the timestamp.
This is somewhat unfortunate. Document as bug.
With these members removed, struct nwsstr no longer matches struct
emptypedstr, so clear news table flag EFF_TYPED and remove union
empobj_storage member news. This loses the automatic maintenance of
member ef_type via struct emptypedstr. Remove ef_type as well.
This shrinks struct nwsstr from 20 to 12 bytes on common 32 bit
machines, and from 32 to 16 bytes on common 64 bit machines. Since
the server doesn't map the whole news file (EFF_MAP is off), this
reduces I/O, while the table's memory use remains the same.
Historical note: struct nwsstr is now pretty much what it was back in
BSD Empire 1.1. Members ef_type and nws_uid go back to Empire 3 (for
C_SYNC?). v4.3.12 added member nws_timestamp, which doubled the size
on common 64 bit machines. v4.3.15 added nws_seqno.
Where ordinary selectors specify a value stored in some object,
virtual selectors specify a function to call to compute a value
associated with some object.
Use them to replace the special case xdump ver by new table
EF_VERSION.
Move configkeys[] to lib/common because nsc_init() needs it to
initialize empfile[EF_VERSION].cadef.
(all): Depend on info.
Flatten info directory. This undoes the move to one subdirectory per
chapter, which was done during Empire 2. The structure doesn't buy us
much, as the info name space is flat, and it complicates makefiles.
Overhaul info.pl:
- It now wants to run in the root of the build tree.
- Information on source files and subjects is now stored in makefiles,
thus info.pl no longer picks up random junk from the file system.
- Clean up Perl anachronisms, in particular use subroutine arguments and
results rather than global variables where convenient.
- Change format of diagnostics to the common format used by GNU tools,
so that Emacs and the like can parse it.
- Catch missing .SA.
- When creating a new subject file, cowardly refuse to overwrite an
existing file.
- Subject files contain topics sorted by chapter, then by name. The
order of chapters used to depend on how Perl sorts hash keys. Fix
it.
