Path: utzoo!utstat!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!dkuug!tidk!storm
From: storm@texas.dk (Kim F. Storm)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Dynamic "smart" expiration?
Keywords: expire,C news
Message-ID: <432@texas.dk>
Date: 29 Dec 89 20:22:26 GMT
References: <1989Dec27.033817.9953@smsc.sony.com> <1989Dec28.063932.13720@robohack.UUCP>
Sender: news@slyrf.dkuug.dk
Organization: Texas Instruments, Denmark
Lines: 37

woods@robohack.UUCP (Greg A. Woods) writes:

>There could even be a flag to determine the
>effect on cross posted articles.  Either the quickest, or the longest,
>expire could be used for all links, or each link could be expired
>separately, with space gained only upon expiration of the last link.

I cannot see what benefits this should give you?

Either you expire an article because disk-space is sparse (or due to
some other resource related policy), or you keep the article.

The problem with your idea is that it makes the "Newsgroups:" line
unreliable which may fool some news readers (users and software :-)
who will say - oh, I will see this article again later in group XYZ
(so I wont read it now), or - oh, I already saw that article in group
ZYX (so I can skip it).

The only reason I can think of for doing what you suggest would be to
make the improved expire run faster compared to what it has to do if
calculating the "combined" usefulness of the article.  I really don't
believe you can save any significant time on this "hack", and I
therefore fail to see that the inconsistency that would be imposed by
this method can be justified by the marginal time savings on expire
(and those savings may be more than wasted on rewriting the history
file to reflect the narrowed set of groups in which the article occur).

An easy rule to calculate the combined usefulness of an article would be
the maximum usefulness of the article in any of the groups to which it
is cross-posted.  This will mean that if an article is important
enough to be kept in one group, it is important enough to keep in all
its groups.

-- 
Kim F. Storm        storm@texas.dk        Tel +45 429 174 00
Texas Instruments, Marielundvej 46E, DK-2730 Herlev, Denmark
	  No news is good news, but nn is better!