Your .meetings file

As stated in the introduction, DISCUSS does not keep a central list of all DISCUSS meetings. Instead, it maintains a personal list for each user of the meetings that they attend. This list contains the information needed by the client programs to access the meetings stored on DISCUSS servers, including the host and pathnames to each meeting. To specify a meeting you can use the meeting name, or your own abbreviation. All this information is stored in a file called .meetings in your home directory. Without this file, DISCUSS will not be able to locate the meetings you attend.

You can change the name and/or location of this file by setting the environment variable MEETINGS to indicate its new pathname. This file is deleted and re-created by DISCUSS in the process of updating the information in it, so that a system crash or program interruption will not cause a loss of data.

The .meetings file contains one line for each meeting you attend, each line being divided into six fields partitioned by colons:

1. Determines what flags are set, ``changed'' being the most common flag.
2. Time the meeting was last visited or changed.
3. Number of the highest transaction seen.
4. Host on which the meeting is stored.
5. Pathname of the meeting on its host.
6. Names and abbreviations for the meeting, separated by commas.

These fields are re-created each time you use DISCUSS, and generally you will have no need to edit them directly. However, you may wish to change or add your own abbreviations for meetings' names, which can be done using emacs or another editor.

If--when you start a DISCUSS client or try listing your meetings--you get an error such as ``Invalid format in meetings file'' or ``Can't get list of meetings'' or (in xdsc) ``Segmentation fault'', then there is probably an error in your .meetings file. Look through it for illegal numbers, misentered paths, and blank lines.