Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ptsfa!hoptoad!gnu
From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Supersedes: filling my disk (not running news 2.11)
Message-ID: <3727@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 24 Dec 87 06:56:37 GMT
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco
Lines: 27

I am running an odd mix of pre-alpha C rnews, 2.10.3 inews, 2.11 vnews,
and such on hoptoad and am beginning to think that the best way to cope with
the new regime on map entries is to add ",!comp.mail.maps" to my sys file.

I don't understand why the entries are posted with 1 month expiration
dates, when sites that pathalias the stuff will copy it off somewhere
else and unpack it anyway, and sites that don't pathalias the stuff
will want it to go away (or can expire it with local control).

I could run the new alpha C expire program, which lets you set "min,
default, and max" expiration times on a per-newsgroup basis, in a
control file.  This could easily force comp.mail.maps stuff to expire
in a reasonable amount of time without bothering the other newsgroups.
However, the C expire doesn't yet keep history of expired articles, and
there seem to be a LOT of old articles flooding the net this month...
I could run old expire twice, once just on comp.mail.maps, but it already
takes it most of an hour of bashing hard on the disk every night.

I suppose I could stop doing news software development and just run a
stock 2.11 patchlevel XXX system, but I wanted to voice a protest to the
"Gotcha!  We finally found a way to force the sites running obsolete software
off the net!" syndrome running around -- from a site that pulls its weight
and has good reasons to run odd newsware.
-- 
{pyramid,ptsfa,amdahl,sun,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu			  gnu@toad.com
  I forsee a day when there are two kinds of C compilers: standard ones and 
  useful ones ... just like Pascal and Fortran.  Are we making progress yet?
	-- ASC:GUTHERY%slb-test.csnet