aem@mthvax.cs.miami.edu (a.e.mossberg) (03/12/91)
There's been a number of expire programs posted, but none of them really have the level of control I'd like. Here's the parameters I'd like to be able to define: maximum articles - a group can have no more than this many articles minimum articles - a group can have no fewer than this many maximum article size - immediately expire any article bigger than this minimum days until expire - how long an acceptably sized article should last maximum days before expire - unless overridden by minimum articles per group standard expiry - expire unless some other condition prevents it The last three are handled by the C news expire, pretty well... but some groups are so low volume that I'd always like to maintain at least the last article or two on-line. Likewise, sometimes people post huge messages and I'd like those to always expire immediately, or for high-volume groups I don't want to keep more than the most recent hundred or so articles. Has anyone already implemented this level of expire program?? aem Has anyone implemented this level of expire program alreayd -- aem@mthvax.cs.miami.edu ....................................................... To plunder, to lie, to show your ass, are three essentials for climbing high. - Aristophanes 424 B.C.
flee@cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) (03/12/91)
I've been thinking about steady-state news, and I think all you need are low- and high-water marks on disk space usage. You provide disk space boundaries for various sets of newsgroups, like so: keep [0, 20] megabytes talk.all + soc.all + all.flame keep [50, 100] megabytes all which means that all of news should take no more than 100M, and noise groups should take no more than 20M of that. To deal with explicit expire date and exceptionally large articles, you can create subsets with set intersection: keep [0, 15] megabytes comp.all * (expires > 30 days) keep [0, 20] megabytes all * (size > 1 megabyte) I don't know if I want time boundaries. As long as news doesn't exceed space boundaries, I don't see a reason to expire it. Well, groups like misc.forsale might want a time boundary keep [0, 7] days all.forsale to keep the contents timely. Time boundaries might conflict with space boundaries. To keep things sane, I think all lower boundaries should be soft. If you say keep [3, ] days all it won't actually guarantee that news is kept 3 days, but it will ring an alarm if news does fall below 3 days in any newsgroup. Comments? Any flaws in this scheme? Any useful features missing? -- Felix Lee flee@cs.psu.edu