[news.software.b] Cnews expire doesn't - help!

ccfj@hippo.ru.ac.za (F.F. Jacot Guillarmod) (03/26/91)

Yet another query on Cnews and expire:

I have searched the old articles in news.software.b for references to
this subject and tried the recommended recipes without success.

The malady is that although I am running a 15 day expire on my news in
a desperate attempt to get disk utilization down, there are still
articles in the news spool directory older than 30 days, and nothing I
do seems to get rid of them.

Here are the steps I have gone through:

1 - stripped my explist to the two liner

/expired/				x	2-20-30	-
all					x	1-10-15	-

2 - deleted my history files

3 - rebuilt the history files from scratch using 'mkhistory' (it
    definitely looks like this isn't picking up all of the
    available articles, but I can't see why)

4 - run 'addmissing' (one of the previous news articles about expiry
    problems recommends this, but maybe I misunderstand the context?)

5 - run 'doexpire -gv'

After all this (repeated several times) there are still old (>30 days)
news articles lurking in the spool directory.  To be exact, the oldest
ones I have spotted are from the 19th February (today is 26th March).
At one stage I commented out the /expired/ in explist, with no useful
result.

If it helps, I am running Cnews with the December 90 patches on a 386
clone with SCO Xenix 2.3.3.  It is built to make use of dbz.

One thing I have noticed is that certain newsgroups have been cleaned
out very neatly, with no old articles.  Other groups, such as sci.space
and rec.food.cooking retain articles, but I can't correlate why some do and
some don't.  The only thing that happened around the 20th Feb is that
this is when I rebuilt Cnews with the December patches - could something
in the rebuild have caused news hierarchies to get somehow hidden away?
Perhaps the root of the problem lies in my active or newsgroups files?
In passing, my newsgroups file is suffering more than somewhat from the
multiple entry problem, but perhaps this is a separate issue.

What am I doing wrong?  Or misunderstanding?  :-(
--
     F.F.  Jacot Guillarmod - Computing  Centre - Rhodes  University
     Artillery Road - P.O Box 94 - Grahamstown - 6140 - South Africa
     Internet: ccfj@hippo.ru.ac.za    Phone: +27 [0]461 22023 xt 284
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