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From: smaug@eng.umd.edu (Kurt Lidl)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Dynamic "smart" expiration?
Message-ID: <1989Dec31.143030.24706@eng.umd.edu>
Date: 31 Dec 89 14:30:30 GMT
References: <1989Dec27.033817.9953@smsc.sony.com> <1989Dec28.063932.13720@robohack.UUCP> <68634@looking.on.ca> <1989Dec29.213539.2801@utzoo.uucp> <6118@yunexus.UUCP> <69448@looking.on.ca> <1120@utoday.UUCP> <`QF52&@rpi.edu> <69654@looking.on.ca>
Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (The News System)
Organization: Dragon Finishing School of Unix and Magic
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In article <69654@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:
[...]
>I liked Eric Raymond's idea the best.  Scan all the .newsrc files.  'and'
>together the 'read' bits.  Expire those articles marked read.

Tough to do with a setup like ours -- about 250 readers, based on 8
different fileservers, with one common NNTP news server.
Just getting to all the .newsrc's to read them is a small challange.

>Thus once everybody's read it, it's history.  Means you can't go back, but
>it also means you can save a *lot* of disk space.

This also means that you cannot go back and retreive an article that you
have passed by.

>A slightly more relaxed scheme would and all the 'read' bits and queue the
>result for deletion in N days.  Article stay N days after everybody has
>read them.  N could vary by group.  In addition, roots of big trees might
>stick around.

This is a good idea.  But I'm not sure how hard it would be to implement.

>Hard to do this with NNTP, though.  But on a machine where disk space is
>important, like a PC, it's the way to go.

This is very, very true.  I have a hard enough time just trying to get
some sort of statistics on how many read what groups in our setup.

>Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
--
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