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From: mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Expires: headers, and when they are appropriate
Message-ID: <861@mcgill-vision.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 15-Aug-87 00:49:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: mcgill-v.861
Posted: Sat Aug 15 00:49:16 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 26-Aug-87 06:17:37 EDT
Organization: McGill University, Montreal
Lines: 36

There has been much furor here over the expiration dates that Chuq is
putting in mod.mag.otherrealms.  The arguments on one side can, I feel,
be summed up in a sentence as "how dare Chuq tell me when is right to
expire things on my system", and on the other as "Chuq is using
Expires: exactly as it was intended to be used".

These are not entirely incompatible with one another.  I agree with the
pro-Expires: camp in that I agree that Chuq is using Expires: exactly
as it was intended.  The argument the anti-Expires: camp has been
advancing seems to me to be an argument against all usage of Expires:,
not against Chuq's usage of it in particular.  It seems to me that they
should admit this and quit trying to make Chuq justify his particular
usage of it (as opposed to its presence in the news software at all,
which is another issue), or come up with another argument.  (Or else
just shut up :-)

It seems to me a quantitative question.  Let's hold a gendanken poll of
all netnews sites, asking them to pick, for the hypothetical group
foo.bar, an expiry time they'd be happy with.  Let's pick some time
reasonably close to the "most common" value (this notion is difficult
to state exactly, but I'm sure you all know what I mean).  That time is
what should appear on the Expires:, or if it equals the default
expiration time, there should be no Expires:.  This results in the
least overall manual intervention required by news admins.

In other words, you can't please everyone, so try to please as many
people as you can.  I think Chuq is coming reasonably close to this, so
I support his use of Expires:.

(Not that it matters to us, either way: we use
expire -I -e 365 -n mod.mag.otherrealms >> expire.out 2>> expire.err
in our regular expire script.)

					der Mouse

				(mouse@mcgill-vision.uucp)