charles@teslab.lab.OZ (Charles W. Widepy) (12/15/89)
There was an article <3505@solo10.cs.vu.nl> received here recently that had an expiry date of the end of 1992. It was over 32K in length, cross-posted to 4 groups (comp.editors, comp.unix.questions, comp.text, comp.misc) but there were multiple copies rather than one copy with multiple links - meaning it would take up about 400 kilobyte-years on the disk (and we didn't even want it). I have two questions: * Why are there multiple copies of a cross-posted article (all other cross-posted articles I have seen here are linked)? * Is it possible to prevent the use of the "Expires:" postnews option?
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (12/20/89)
In article <234@teslab.lab.OZ> charles@teslab.lab.oz.au (Charles W. Widepy) writes: >* Is it possible to prevent the use of the "Expires:" postnews >option? Not readily. It's really easy to just edit up your article with whatever headers you want and give it to "inews -h". The real fix is to have a way to tell expire "articles are not allowed to stay around more than N days, regardless of what their headers say". C News expire has this; the prototype expire-control file that we include sets a 90-day default limit, which can be overridden on a group-by-group basis. -- 1755 EST, Dec 14, 1972: human | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology exploration of space terminates| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
maart@cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath) (12/20/89)
In article <234@teslab.lab.OZ> charles@teslab.lab.OZ (Charles W. Widepy) writes:
\There was an article <3505@solo10.cs.vu.nl> received here recently
\that had an expiry date of the end of 1992. It was over 32K in
\length, cross-posted to 4 groups (comp.editors, comp.unix.questions,
\comp.text, comp.misc)
The article was posted by me (the Vi Reference). I have used the `Expires:'
header option because the same questions tend to get asked over and over;
if people would start reading comp.editors, the very first article they'd
find would be the Reference. I have kept the `Message-ID' to be able to use
the `Supersedes' option when a new version will be ready. I have cross-posted
to other groups of interest because on many sites comp.editors seems not to be
available.
\but there were multiple copies rather than one
\copy with multiple links - meaning it would take up about 400
\kilobyte-years on the disk (and we didn't even want it). I have two
\questions:
\
\* Why are there multiple copies of a cross-posted article (all other
\cross-posted articles I have seen here are linked)?
It seems your news software must be fixed: at our site there are 4 links to
the same file.
\* Is it possible to prevent the use of the "Expires:" postnews
\option?
That would be a disservice to the net: normally one uses this header item to
SHORTEN an article's lifetime, because of its topical contents. Often the
`Expires:' line is simply ignored by the `expire' program.
I used the `Expires:' option to LENGHTEN the lifetime, because some other
more appropriate option seems not to be available (hint).
--
Sci.aquaria votes are only poisson distributed in France. (Alan M Stanier) |
Maarten Litmaath @ VU Amsterdam: maart@cs.vu.nl, uunet!mcsun!botter!maart