Re: archiving threads one contributes to

[Emanuel Berg]

Alan Schmitt <alan.schmitt@polytechnique.org> writes:

> No. Right now some article are present in my agent
> cache (in
> agent/nntp/news.gwene.org/gmane/emacs/gnus/user). If
> I understand things correctly, these articles may
> expire at some point:
>
>   gnus-agent-expire-days
>   
> The number of days that a ‘read’ article must stay in
> the agent's local disk before becoming eligible for
> expiration (While the name is the same, this doesn't
> mean expiring the article on the server. It just
> means deleting the local copy of the article).
>
> What is also important to understand is that the
> counter starts with the time the article was written
> to the local disk and not the time the article was
> read. Default 7.

I also have that value 7 and all my posts are there,
from way back. Perhaps just because the posts are
marked in certain ways, you still have to issue some
command to have them removed from your disk. I don't
know except I have old posts, lots of them.

> I want to make sure the articles are copied locally
> to some place where they won't expire. However I
> don't want to retain every article posted on these
> newsgroups indefinitely.

Why not? It is just a bunch of text files, all neatly
organized already. My News directory is 5.7M!

If you want to delete the files with discretion,
perhaps you can tell Gnus never to do it (if indeed
Gnus does it for you) and then write a script that
deletes unwanted posts habitually while keeping some,
based on the Message ID and Subject headers I
mentioned.

> It seems the default value is to delete.

I don't know, mine are there. Check your folders, don't
you have old posts?

> And the manual argues against caching everything: "If
> you have an extremely slow NNTP connection, you may
> consider turning article caching on. Each article
> will then be stored locally under your home
> directory. As you may surmise, this could potentially
> use huge amounts of disk space, as well as eat up all
> your inodes so fast it will make your head swim. In
> vodka."

With "caching" do you mean keep local copies on the
disk, i.e., the news ASCII files with digits as names?
(e.g., 5527)?

I don't see how a bunch of such files can do anything
to either disk space or deplete your inode supply.

Try 'df -i' to see if you are running out of inodes, I
have all filesystems one or two percent.

Perhaps that manual entry was written in another time
with small disks/inode filesystems, very enthusiastic
Useneters, and/or or with respect to posts carrying
binary data?

-- 
underground experts united