gam@amdahl.UUCP (G A Moffett) (02/19/86)
RAW DATA
The question was:
"Should the Usenet/UUCP map postings to mod.map have extended
expiration dates?"
The votes were:
Yes: 15
No: 19
Abstain: 1
ANALYSIS
Many of the "no" votes reported that they keep the maps not in
mod.map, but stored elsewhere (possibly via uuhosts). The
postings themselves are not useful until processed, at which
point the postings can be thrown away. A few of them suggested
that the expiration date on the map postings be as short as
five days -- or even two!
The commentary with some of the "yes" votes pointed out that
was convienient to have the maps on-line in mod.map for 30 days
because they are reposted (presumably updated) every 30 days --
thus mod.map *always* contains the current map data by
default. Some were concerned that naive sites would wonder
where the maps are if they expired after the default 14 days.
SOLUTIONS
Both sides reported that, whatever the decision, each could
handle things as they wished. In the current state of affairs,
if you don't want the maps in mod.maps around for longer than
the default time, you set up your daily expire thus:
expire -n all # expire as usual
expire -n mod.map -i -e 14 # force mod.map to conform
Likewise, if the extended expiration date on the mod.map
postings were removed, you could retain the maps for 30 days
thus:
expire -n all, !mod.map # expire as usual, *except* mod.map
expire -n mod.map -e 30 # expire mod.map after 30 days
It was this particular solution, in fact, that prompted my
protest of the current state of things: wouldn't people who
*didn't* want the maps around for 30 days not like to have to
run expire twice on their system? There was only one voter who
mentioned that running expire twice would be too much bother,
and this person wanted the maps around for 30 days.
[ As a footnote, Tony Hansen (pegasus!tony) pointed out that
expiring mod.map early need not be done by expire. A simple
matter of:
find /usr/spool/news/mod/map -type f -mtime +14 \
-print | xargs rm -f
would accomplish the task, too. Note that
"-print | xargs rm -f" can be replaced with
"-exec rm -f {} \;" if you don't have xargs. ]
OPINION
I raised this issue not so much for my own needs (the mighty
Amdahl 470 does four passes of expire every night), but for the
benefit of those sites whose news disc is full, much of the
fullness provided by mod.map. I have learned that people with
full discs have a way to deal with the current state of
affairs, seemingly without much protest.
After this, I see that things are not as bad off as I had
thought. The expiration date of those postings is not
inflexible, and each site can deal with it as they wish.
While I appeared to vote against the extended expiration dates
at the beginning, I have been slow shifting towards neutrality
on this issue (I did not make the `abstain' vote). If the
decision were left in my hands now, even given the vote, I
would not change the expiration of mod.map postings. As one
voter, Scott Orshan (bellcoreau1100a!sdo), put it:
> What I was trying to say was that my vote is YES, but votes shouldn't
> necessarily decide this issue. Votes are very selfish. This issue
> affects the net as a whole.
SUMMARY
The poll is complete. The decision is left to Mark Horton, who
posts the maps to mod.map, as to whether the expiration dates
on those postings will be changed or not.
SEE ALSO
The original mail and Usenet articles that made up the votes is
availalbe on request.
The manual page for expire(8) will describe the various options
you have to expire newsgroups. In particular, see the -e, -I
and -i options.
Uuhosts(1) provides a means to manage map postings; see it's
man page.
The _Standard of Interchange of USENET Messages_ describes the
"Expires: " line in the article header, and what its format
should be.
--
Gordon A. Moffett ...!{ihnp4,seismo,hplabs}!amdahl!gam
~ And what is truth? ~
~ Is truth unchanging law? ~
~ We both have truths ~
~ Are mine the same as yours? ~mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (02/20/86)
Thank you, Gordon, for taking the time to run this survey. It seems to me that the results are not decisive, and in fact, as someone pointed out, perhaps a vote isn't the thing to do here anyway. The reason I say this is that it seems that people who would vote are smart enough to be able to override the default if they are unhappy with it. The real question is: what should the naive sites who don't take any special measures get as default behavior? One possible answer is that a naive site isn't running uuhosts, so when they suddenly find out that the map exists, they should be able to go get it from mod.map without having to wait a month for it, or having to ask someone else to ship it. (I get several requests per month for a copy of the map; I refer these folks to mod.map and most of them seem satisfied, except for the folks in Missouri that are downstream of some kind of problem - we're working on this one.) Another possible answer is that such naive sites that are unaware of the map shouldn't have their disk space filled up with it for any longer than the default. For now I'll leave the expiration at 30 days, but I'm open to opinions, and it's easy to change. Mark