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From: news@massey.ac.nz (USENET News System)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Expire by Date:
Message-ID: <1991Mar14.012332.20774@massey.ac.nz>
Date: 14 Mar 91 01:23:32 GMT
Reply-To: K.Spagnolo@massey.ac.nz (Ken Spagnolo)
Organization: Massey University Computer Centre
Lines: 25

I like c-news a lot, but really miss the ability to expire articles
by the Date: line, rather than the arrival time, as b-news allowed.
It's much slower, of course, but I can think of two situations where
this is very important.  The first is when heaps of old articles appear,
like in comp.os.minix recently.  5Mb of garbage must be gotten rid of,
but it's not nice to have to expire recent articles along with the
garbage.  The second is just a larger example of the first.  We're a
leaf node with one feed.  I keep articles about 10 days and run the news
partition as close to full as I can without constant intervention.  If
we loose our feed for a few days for whatever reason (and it happens
more often than one would hope), we then get say two days of news all 
at once when things come right.  With b-news, I'd switch expiry over
to date posted for a while, and the late articles expire roughly the
same time they would have normally and without bothering any other
articles.  With c-news, I'm forced to set the expiry time for all
groups very low to get rid of this `lump'.  Otherwise, ten days later,
the partition will fill, stopping the feed for two days until the
lump is expired and then receive a new lump and off we go again.

Am I the only one who feels this is important?  Are there plans to add
this feature to c-news?  If not, what is the rational?

Thanx much,
-- 
K.Spagnolo@massey.ac.nz