Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 alpha 4/3/85; site ukma.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ukma!david
From: david@ukma.UUCP (David Herron, NPR Lover)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Should the Usenet/UUCP maps have extended expiration dates?
Message-ID: <2608@ukma.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 1-Feb-86 12:50:29 EST
Article-I.D.: ukma.2608
Posted: Sat Feb  1 12:50:29 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 2-Feb-86 02:51:10 EST
References: <2658@amdahl.UUCP>
Reply-To: david@ukma.UUCP (David Herron, NPR Lover)
Organization: U of KY Mathematical Sciences
Lines: 29

In article <2658@amdahl.UUCP> gam@amdahl.UUCP (G A Moffett) writes:
>The map postings to mod.map are made with extended expiration
>dates -- 30 days, to be exact -- so they don't get expired (erased)
>as soon as other postings are.  The consequence of this is that they
>take up a lot of disk space for a longer than usual time.  They are
>valuable, but they also take up a lot of space.

My first thought was, of course it needs to be kept around that long.
But then I remembered all the details of how I use them here.  I don't
use the copy that's in the spool directory, instead I use a hacked
copy of uuhosts, unpack them into another directory, and run pathalias
over there.  So really, I could live with shorter expire times.  But
we have enough disk space that it doesn't matter (barely).

The only reason I have left for keeping them around is because I edit
a couple of the files because of known problems.  So I might want
to refer to the original piece at some time.

In fact.  I can't think of any other way to use the data.  In it's
form as an article it's not very useful.  So you want to unshar it
into another directory for dealing with it.  And uuhosts is a fine
program for dealing with the data...  And if you're really tight
on disk space, you could always delete the comments...

That's my opinion.
-- 
David Herron,  cbosgd!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET, soon, david@uky.csnet.

Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.