gam@amdahl.UUCP (G A Moffett) (01/28/86)
The map postings to mod.map are made with extended expiration
dates -- 30 days, to be exact -- so they don't get expired (erased)
as soon as other postings are. The consequence of this is that they
take up a lot of disk space for a longer than usual time. They are
valuable, but they also take up a lot of space.
I sent a letter to the Usenet/UUCP map posters suggesting that
it would be best to leave off the extended expiration date
and allow individual sites to decide how to handle these
articles (if they immediately archive them, for example, and
thus have not need for them on-line).
Mark Horton suggested I bring my case to the public, so I am.
Please keep in mind that while *you* may have a particular procedure
for handling mod.map that does/doesn't require extended expiration
dates, the question we are asking is: what should the default be
for the *vanilla* package?
(While this article is being posted to net.news and net.news.config,
followups are directed to net.news only.)
Here is my original letter, which states the case pretty well:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I question the extended expiration dates for the uucp map data
postings. It appears they are specified to expire, by default,
after 30 days. That is, a site that runs the default
"expire -n 14" still won't expire the maps older than 14 days!
I appreciate how valuable the map information is and how important
it is to keep the net informed of the current shape of things,
and these postings do accomplish this, but I think having such
an extension on expiring such *large* articles takes away
the democratic choice of news administrars to expire things
(hopefully big things) as soon as they would like.
"Well," you would say, "they could always use the expire option
to *ignore* the 'Expires: ' line. Then the maps would be expired
as they would like."
This would have nearly dismissed my complaint, except that
I don't think that sites should have to [1] force all their
articles to be expired regardless of 'Expires: ' date; or
[2] have to run expire once more, for the special case of
mod.map (this is especially a burden to small machines,
or machines without much spare time...). I think that
extended expiration dates should be used with discretion,
for articles whose content bears hirer that usual importance,
especially where net matters are concerned. The maps
are of higher than usual importance, and are of almost fundamental
value to the net. I feel, however, that their size is enough
to exclude them from extended expiration dates.
Perhaps sites should be warned that the maps are posted only
once a month, and that these postings will normally expire
after 14 (or whatever default) days. But let them deal with
that situation as *they* would like.
Gordon
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ end of letter ]
Well, how *would* they (that's you) like to deal with that?
--
Gordon A. Moffett ...!{ihnp4,cbosgd,seismo,hplabs}!amdahl!gam
~ See the soldier with his gun ~
~ Who must be dead to be admired ~