Customisable expiry - how?

Dickon Hood dickon.hood at bbc.co.uk
Tue Dec 5 14:33:45 UTC 2000


I have a reasonably unusual request.

I'm using INN as the article database backend to a web-based forums
system, to replace the Oracle thing we have ATM.  See
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/forums/> if you're interested in the old one; new
one will be (re- don't ask...)launched soon.

So far, so good.

I need to expire in a somewhat unorthodox way, however.  Rather that
deleting articles based solely on their age, I need to delete threads
which haven't had a post made to them for a while.  I have lumps of Perl
which determine what consitutes a thread, and which articles to delete,
but I'm not sure what the best way of going about deleting them would be.

I can locate the articles in the spool directory easily enough, and I'm
sure unlink()ing them from Perl wouldn't be too hard, but obviously that
doesn't take in to account any of INN's overview and history databases.
Given that I'm talking about a maximum number of about 500K articles in
the spool directory at any one time (and that's an absolute maximum), I
thought that I could just regenerate the indices after purging the files.

My questions:

  *  Is this workable?

  *  If not, can anyone think of a better way?

  *  Would it be easier to hack expire to do what I want, do you think?

Thanks.

-- 
Dickon Hood

BBC Internet Services,
Kingswood Warren.
(+44 1737 8)39754.  Mail me.  Don't phone if possible.  Ta.
And use a Subject line.  They're there for a reason.



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