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From: jerry@olivey.ATC.Olivetti.Com (Jerry Aguirre)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Expire by Date:
Summary: Add old news to history file with posting, rather than
	arrival date and it will automatically expire quickly.
Message-ID: <50518@olivea.atc.olivetti.com>
Date: 20 Mar 91 07:20:23 GMT
References: <1991Mar14.194554.12750@zoo.toronto.edu> <50464@olivea.atc.olivetti.com> <1991Mar17.012032.9351@zoo.toronto.edu>
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In article <1991Mar17.012032.9351@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <50464@olivea.atc.olivetti.com> jerry@olivey.ATC.Olivetti.Com (Jerry Aguirre) writes:
>>could, right now and very easily, put 362 Meg of old news onto the net.

>No, and neither could yours, since your proposed changes just make it
>expire earlier -- they don't eliminate it on arrival, which is what is
>really needed.

Well, actually, I think it could.  NNTP is going to stop accepting
xfers when my free disk gets down to 5 Meg.  When the regular expire
does not free up enough space the script will run "expire -n junk -p -e
7 -E 60".  That will get rid of the old postings.  The second expire
runs fairly quickly as it only has to look at the "junk" postings, not
every bit of news.  Granted there would be a hickup in the flow but I
expect more of that would be from my feeds' problems rather than mine.
Of course if the feeds were via UUCP ....

But back to the issue of handling old articles.  I am a little leary of
just trashing them.  Suppose the problem is not with the articles but
rather with the system date.  Every once an a while the service guys
will run something that clobbers the machine date real good.  (NTP has
helped reduce this problem.)  I dislike the idea of the system just
trashing the articles though B news's technique of putting them in junk
for two weeks is not that great either.

If one does trash them then should one add them to the history file?
If not then they can be resent and trashed several times.  If they are
then one can not get them again after the system date is corrected.

How about adding old article IDs to the history file but with the
posting date instead of the arrival date?  That way they will expire
thru the normal process and even the ID will flush out of the history
file.  One has to parse the posting date anyway and this would only
apply to old articles so it would not effect normal operation.  One
could even install the articles in the normal groups with the knowledge
that they will not outlast the next regular expire.  (Of course they
should not get forwarded on.)

					Jerry Aguirre