[news.newusers.questions] How to kill superseded articles

se208104@seas.gwu.edu (William Lai) (02/28/90)

In newsgroups such as news.announce.newusers, there are periodic posting
of such things as "How to post on USENET" and such introductory material.
Usually there are more than one version of the same article exist at the same
time.  Is there a way to KILL the superceded article upon receipt of the new
one?  I believe that one of the header lines is "supercede such-and-such".
Maybe that could be used?

BTW, I've RTFM and just can't figure it out. Thanks in advance.

William Lai

tale@cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) (02/28/90)

In article <1640@sparko.gwu.edu> se208104@seas.gwu.edu (William Lai) writes:

> Is there a way to KILL the superceded article upon receipt of the
> new one?  I believe that one of the header lines is "supercede
> such-and-such".  Maybe that could be used?

What news system?  C News, as of the 10 Jan 90 patch, now will handle
the Supercedes: header directly in relaynews.  The original article is
cancelled.  Prior to this you had to use $NEWSBIN/expire/superkludge
to get the supercedes header to work, and then it only did it in the
groups named on the command line.  Now superceding is done a little
bit more efficiently at the cost of a slightly less efficient
relaynews.

As far as I know, which in this case is only memories of when we were
a B News site, supercedes are not done by B 2.11 but they might be in
the most recently releases.  (If so, someone who hopefully point that
out -- if not, then you could use a modified superkludge.)  The
possibility that Supercedes: is not done by B News is somewhat
corroborated by the fact that the header is not mentioned in Section 2
of RFC 1036.

One further note on superkludge: it only removes the file of the
superceded article.  References to the file in lib/history* will
remain until the article expires normally.

I don't know how other news systems deal with Supercedes:.

Dave
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