Apur-phy.312
net.news.b
utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!purdue!pur-phy!crl
Thu Apr 29 16:39:52 1982
Bug in expire.c
I think I have found a bug in expire.c.  It has to do with expire trying
to decide whether an article has passed its expiration date.  The way
the recent mod was written, it would never expire any article that didn't
have an explicit expiration date. Here it is:

At about line 82:
	now = time(0);
	newtime = now + expincr;   /* where expincr = DFLTEXP or time specified
					by -e option */
and then at line 137:
	h.exptime = cgtdate(h.expdate);
	if (!h.expdate[0] || ignorexp==2 ||
	    (ignorexp==1 && newtime < h.exptime))
		h.exptime = newtime;
	if (now >= h.exptime) {
	      /* cancel the article */

	}

Notice what this says.  It sets newtime to some time in the future (usually
2 weeks), and then, if there is no expiration time in the article, it sets
h.exptime to it.  This guarantees that now <= h.exptime, so the article is
never cancelled.  I managed to fix this by looking at the old version of
expire.  Remove the line newtime = now + expincr and add after the h.exptime
= cgtdate( . . .) the line:
	newtime = cgtdate(h.recdate) + expincr;
At least, this seemed to work!

On another topic, remember that if you've been truncating the history
file, make sure you don't lose any current news articles from it, or they
will never get deleted by expire, nor can you cancel them manually.

Charles LaBrec
pur-ee!physics:crl