cfv@packet.UUCP (06/22/83)
A couple of things to ponder:
I muffed the setuid bit the afternoon after I made my comment that expire
probably should be setuid to news. Result: when expire ran that night, the
history files became owned by root. When the news came in after that,
inews couldn't touch those files, and so history didn't update. I am set
up so that /usr/lib/news, and usr/spool/{news,oldnews} are writeable only
by the news account. I assume I am not the only person who has to do this
(as an aside, if expire isn't setuid to news, anything archived in oldnews
by a crontab process becomes owned by root, not news. This might be a
problem at some sites, I don't know). Anyway, in future releases expire
should probably be [chown news expire; chmod 4700 expire] in the Makefile
to keep this from happening. It does bring up an interesting problem
though: my history file is now out of date, and so I am goin to have to
(eventually) expire those articles that came in by hand or figure out how
to get them into history. Assuming that this problem has occurred at least
once before, has someone solved this and has a program they want to donate
to the cause, or at least a hint?
Second, a strange thought: Has anyone given any thought to the possibility
of keeping track of the users and what they have seen and expiring a
message after everyone has seen it? This might cut down rather
significantly of the filesystem requirements for news, and it would keep me
from having to manually keep track of our users .newsrc files (my spool
file is a little tight for space temporarily, so I have been expiring
select topics early to keep things from overflowing until I can expand it.
If expire was smart enough to get rid of it when my system was done with
it, it would save me some time).
It seems to me that what you would have to do is map all of the messages
and then check each .newsrc for the list of read messages. Any message
that has not been read is removed from the map, and when all of the .newsrc
files are read, anything left in the map can be removed. Special
dispensation for 'Expires:' messages would have to be made as well, I
guess, but this might make the history file obsolete. Any comments?
--
>From the dungeons of the Warlock:
Chuck Von Rospach
ucbvax!amd70!packet!cfv
(chuqui@mit-mc) <- obsolete!mark@umcp-cs.UUCP (06/23/83)
Expiring articles when everyone has read them would lose for
users who later want to go back and find something they
remember reading but at the time didn't think important enough
to save (but now they do). Like me.
--
UUCP: {seismo,allegra,brl-bmd}!umcp-cs!mark
CSNet: mark@umcp-cs
ARPA: mark.umcp-cs@UDel-Relaycfv@packet.UUCP (06/24/83)
Hmm... I forgot about going back and re-reading. Please ignore my previous
suggestion.
--
>From the dungeons of the Warlock:
Chuck Von Rospach
ucbvax!amd70!packet!cfv
(chuqui@mit-mc) <- obsolete!furuta@uw-beaver.UUCP (06/26/83)
What I would like to see is the ability to set different default expiration times on different newsgroups. Some I'd like to keep longer than the default 2 weeks, others for less. --Rick ...decvax!microsoft!uw-beaver!furuta (uucp) ...ucbvax!lbl-csam!uw-beaver!furuta ...ihnp4!uw-beaver!furuta or Furuta@Washington (ARPAnet)