mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse) (08/15/87)
There has been much furor here over the expiration dates that Chuq is putting in mod.mag.otherrealms. The arguments on one side can, I feel, be summed up in a sentence as "how dare Chuq tell me when is right to expire things on my system", and on the other as "Chuq is using Expires: exactly as it was intended to be used". These are not entirely incompatible with one another. I agree with the pro-Expires: camp in that I agree that Chuq is using Expires: exactly as it was intended. The argument the anti-Expires: camp has been advancing seems to me to be an argument against all usage of Expires:, not against Chuq's usage of it in particular. It seems to me that they should admit this and quit trying to make Chuq justify his particular usage of it (as opposed to its presence in the news software at all, which is another issue), or come up with another argument. (Or else just shut up :-) It seems to me a quantitative question. Let's hold a gendanken poll of all netnews sites, asking them to pick, for the hypothetical group foo.bar, an expiry time they'd be happy with. Let's pick some time reasonably close to the "most common" value (this notion is difficult to state exactly, but I'm sure you all know what I mean). That time is what should appear on the Expires:, or if it equals the default expiration time, there should be no Expires:. This results in the least overall manual intervention required by news admins. In other words, you can't please everyone, so try to please as many people as you can. I think Chuq is coming reasonably close to this, so I support his use of Expires:. (Not that it matters to us, either way: we use expire -I -e 365 -n mod.mag.otherrealms >> expire.out 2>> expire.err in our regular expire script.) der Mouse (mouse@mcgill-vision.uucp)
sa@ttidca.TTI.COM (Steve Alter) (08/25/87)
Why the big fight? If a site wants to allow expiration to use the
Expires: headers, then fine. If another site wants to ignore the Expires:
headers and use a fixed period of time for all postings, then that's fine
too. The expire program can handle both, and can even mix-and-match the
two mechanisms for selected newsgroups (checkout -i and -I options.) It's
all so versatile!
I won't dictate to Chuq or to anyone else what s/he should do with his/her
system because we each, the responsible news-administrators that we are,
can do what our individual sites need or want.
-- Steve Alter
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Citicorp/TTI, Santa Monica CA (213) 452-9191 x2541