Newsgroups: news.admin
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Cnews wish
Message-ID: <1989Sep12.230820.2296@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1401@esquire.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 89 23:08:20 GMT

In article <1401@esquire.UUCP> yost@esquire.UUCP (David A. Yost) writes:
>I would be pleased to read the following
>(or equivalent) about Cnews:
>    ...
>    articles will stay around as long as
>    possible, being deleted automatically only
>    as space is needed for new articles...
>    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...

Well, this may half-please you. :-)  It's not set up that way out of the
box.  But at least part of it -- expiry only on space shortage -- can be
done by minor changes to shell files.  People have done it.  We don't
have a "remove list" or anything like that, but you could get much the
same effect by doing iterative expiry, generating expire control files
specifying successively tighter expiry times until you had enough free
space to suit you.  The overhead needn't be very high if it's managed
intelligently.  Again, we don't provide the solution, but I think most
of the tools are there to build your own.
-- 
V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu