Path: utzoo!mnetor!tmsoft!robohack!woods
From: woods@robohack.UUCP (Greg A. Woods)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Dynamic "smart" expiration?
Keywords: expire,C news
Message-ID: <1989Dec31.083610.10649@robohack.UUCP>
Date: 31 Dec 89 08:36:10 GMT
References: <1989Dec27.033817.9953@smsc.sony.com> <1989Dec28.063932.13720@robohack.UUCP> <432@texas.dk>
Organization: R. H. Lathwell Associates:  Elegant Communications, Inc.
Lines: 36

In article <432@texas.dk> storm@texas.dk (Kim F. Storm) writes:
> 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.

And since inodes are also a resource, this is a resource conserving
option.  On many machines it would not be difficult to have a
partition which would have lots of free blocks, and no free inodes if,
for example, the average article size dropped from 3Kb to 1Kb.

I also came to like this option for some of the reasons opposite to
those you mentioned.  I read news on what is primarily a single user
site (this, my home machine).  Some groups have had a significant
amount of cross posting.  Since I might want some groups to disappear
faster than others, but not those articles which appeared in a more
interesting group , I might choose the "longest" option.  On the other
hand, the cross postings might be mostly noise, as in unix-pc to
comp.sys.att.  In this case I might want to choose the "quickest".

Since I beleive that a shift of the majority of news readers to
smaller machines, with fewer fellow readers is happening, personal
control over expiry will have many distinct advantages for an
increasing number of people.
-- 
						Greg A. Woods

woods@{robohack,gate,tmsoft,ontmoh,utgpu,gpu.utcs.Toronto.EDU,utorgpu.BITNET}
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