At 1:37 PM -0400 10/6/00, Linda Wack is rumored to have typed:
Because what happens is that after a day or two has passed without any list activity, one or more people will post in the morning, but the digest is not delivered on schedule in the afternoon.
Actually, _this_ is the part I don't understand...the idea that there should be a "scheduled" time for the digest to be released. If you set the digest age to 20-22 hours, and run .bin/cronlist every six hours, you can be pretty confident that no message will sit longer than a day, without sending unnecessarily small issues. Of course, your issue will be released at whichever of the four runs is ~24 hours past the first message included, but then you'll have the same thing happen if it gets active and beats your size limit (which should _always_ be under 50k if there's a juno address in your list...).
My point is, frankly, that those who subscribe to the interactive version get their mail immeidately, and those who subscribe to the digest version _expect_ the mail to be delayed. So what reason could there be for mandating a 2:00pm release every day, needed or not?
As an aside (and not to you directly since you get it), the one thing I've noticed people have trouble grasping about SmartList is that the digest age clock starts ticking not when the last digest is released, but when the first message comes in _after_ that digest is released. Maybe this could be made clearer in the documentation in a future version?
I'm not sure that this one is necessary because I believe that flush_digests does this test and exits early if there is no digest.body
Irrelevant; why create the .digest.force file if it isn't necessary? (And again, using the method detailed above, you never _need_ to create that file, since you're pretty sure of no message being in the queue longer than a day.) Besides, the problem with creating .digest.force when there is no archive/latest/digest.body file is that the digest will end up being released on the next message no matter _what_ time it comes in (if you're determined to send it out at a specific time, then this is a bad thing, and if not, sending out what is in effect an interactive digest issue is a bad thing, making a lose-lose).
(I don't have access to the flush_digest code right now, but I noticed this somewhere)
Gad, I love responding to people who actually read the open-source _before_ asking their question. You ever need any help with anything dealing with SmartList, I'm your guy.
Charlie