Re: archiving threads one contributes to

[Emanuel Berg]

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

>> 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!
>
> I've been using gnus to read news and RSS for two
> weeks (before it was only for email), and mine is at
> 53M. I see that all the RSS from gwene is cached
> there as well.

Yes, 53M is a lot in two weeks!

Either you have just been much, much more active, or
there is something different in our setups/usage.

You can check how many files you have in ~/News with:

  $ file ~/News -type f | wc -l

and ditto directories, '-type d'. (I have 725 in 63.)

>> 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.
>
> I've dig a little into this, and it seems that one
> needs to manually run 'gnus-agent-expire' or
> gnus-agent-expire-group' ...  the way, you should
> check the value of agent-enable-expiration in your
> groups, if it's ENABLE and you call one of these
> commands, then old messages will go away.

The value of `gnus-agent-enable-expiration' is indeed
ENABLE, but I take it it doesn't matter as I won't
invoke those commands?

> (A bit later ...) I marked the messages I wanted to
> keep with '*', and I ran 'gnus-agent-expire'. It
> freed about 30M (it may seem small, but recall that
> I've been using it for about 2 weeks). So I guess a
> combination of '*' and regularly expiring is the
> solution here.

In the help for `gnus-agent-enable-expiration', it
says:

    This value may be overridden to disable expiration
    in specific categories, topics, and groups.  Of
    course, you could change
    gnus-agent-enable-expiration to DISABLE then enable
    expiration per categories, topics, and groups.

So I think perhaps that'd be worth examining.

If marking is the best way for you, perhaps you could
"semi-automatize" that for example by writing a defun
that when you call it, it marks all messages in the
thread (with the same subject, say), or something like
this.

Because, you have a very well-defined thing what you'd
like to do and not to do. Delete all except for those
in threads where I (you) have been active. That's
something that's 100% possible to automatize, you just
have to find out how.

But from my perspective I would rather examine why your
News is so big after so little time.

-- 
underground experts united