Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!pyrnj!esquire!yost
From: yost@esquire.UUCP (David A. Yost)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Cnews wish
Message-ID: <1401@esquire.UUCP>
Date: 12 Sep 89 15:46:50 GMT
Organization: DP&W, New York, NY
Lines: 40

All I know about Cnews is that it exists
and is being worked on, so the following
suggestion comes from left (Bnews) field.

I would be pleased to read the following
(or equivalent) about Cnews:

    Cnews automatically manages the disk space
    used by news articles in a FIFO fashion.
    Thus, you don't have to keep tweaking expire
    times to make sure don't run out of space;
    articles will stay around as long as
    possible, being deleted automatically only
    as space is needed for new articles.  (Cnews
    will ensure that the free space on a given
    file system used for articles always exceeds
    the disk-reserve configuration parameter for
    that file system.)

    Articles are removed in the order specified
    in the "remove-list", a FIFO list of article
    file names.  The remove-list is accessed by
    a pair of routines (also accessible through
    programs) that push and pull files from the
    list (which is implemented as a table in the
    Cnews article database).

    The new Cnews version of the expire program
    is normally used only to add filenames to
    the remove-list, rather than deleting them
    immediately as was the case in Bnews.  The
    purpose of Cnews expire is only to set the
    lifetimes of different newsgroups relative to
    each other.  Any particular article will only
    live until it is its turn to be deleted.  You
    can also use the new Cnews expire to delete
    some number of articles (or amount of disk
    space) from the head of the remove-list.

 --dave yost