In message <9405250617.AA25766@saimiri.primate.wisc.edu>, Software Development
writes:
> > [rouilj writes:]
> > Bingo, you got the joke. Basically there is no way I can determine
> > when a new volume number needs to be issued. It seems to me that there
> > is a limit of 999 issues per volume, but I doubt many people will allow
> > the issue numbers to get that high before issuing a new volume.
>
> I guess I don't know what you mean by there being no way to determine when
> a new volume number needs to be issued.
Actually I should have said, there is know way to know
apriori. Somebody would have to give me a clue.
> Wouldn't it work to have a
> configuration parameter indicating the maximum number of issues per
> volume? (I'm not saying, "please make this change", I'm trying to understand
> what the difficulty might be.) A value of 0 might indicate "no maximum,
> never rollover."
Yes, it probably would, but people usually want to change the issue
number yearly or biyearly, and not based on the number of issues in
the volume. Look at volume numbers for Newsweek, or Time, or your
local paper. Special issues of the magazine/paper are number
sequentially with the rest of the issues. Some years have more issues
than others. Ditto with digests since they can be (and often need to
be) triggered based on size which is related to mailing list traffic
rather than based on "dates of issue".
Trying to come up with a syntax for handling various rollover dates
and the explanations about how to use such a feature would have been
even worse than requiring regular expression use in the config file 8-).
An increment volume command along the lines of mkdigest would be a
valid request though. Probably in a 2.0 addin unless somebody writes a
clean implementation first.
-- John
John Rouillard
Senior Systems Consultant (SERL Project) University of Massachusetts at Boston
rouilj@cs.umb.edu (preferred) Boston, MA, (617) 287-6480
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