On Tue, 23 Jun 1992 10:26:26 EST Nick Laflamme <NLAFLAMM@IRISHVMA> said:
 
>I'm sure Eric will  correct me if I'm wrong, but  I think LISTSERV needs
>to keep its subscriber lists in  node-sorted order so it can efficiently
>distribute mail and bunch addressees appropriately. If you sort manually
>and replace, results are not predictable,  and even if it survives that,
>LISTSERV will try to add new users in node sorted order, but I'm kind of
>skeptical  about LISTSERV  surviving that  kind  of abuse  in the  first
>place.
 
This  was correct  a  few releases  ago,  and is  still  correct in  some
respects,  but the  situation is  changing. LISTSERV  does keep  the list
sorted  by nodeid  and may  indeed re-sort  it this  way when  adding new
subscribers. The "Mail-via= Direct" exploder does assume that the list is
sorted this way, but that code is going to be removed some day, as I said
in the last release notes. DISTRIBUTE doesn't care in what order the list
was sorted,  because it gets recipient  lists from all kinds  of unsorted
sources and has to be able to handle them.
 
So if you  run 1.7c and use  DISTRIBUTE for the list,  nothing really bad
should  happen  if you  sort  the  recipients  another way,  except  that
LISTSERV is  liable to re-sort  it the "right" way  from time to  time. I
still advise against  playing with the LIST files, though,  as I may have
forgotten some  side-effect impact  and any code  that tampers  will LIST
files will  stop working eventually, as  I have plans to  radically alter
the way subscriptions are recorded by the server.
 
  Eric