Best way to *really* delete a newsgroup?

[Russ Allbery]

Christopher P Lindsey <isc.org at spamfodder.com> writes:

>    I have several local newsgroups that I want to delete off of the
>    server entirely (that means history and overview entries and the
>    actual article itself).  My expire times are set to never, so running
>    'ctlinnd rmgroup' will only remove the newsgroup from the active
>    file, but the history/overview/article are still hanging around.

ctlinnd rmgroup should make the overview go away as well.  What overview
method are you using, and what version of INN?

But yeah, in general completely removing articles from deleted groups
doesn't work all that well right now.  tradspool has a real problem with
this, since it basically just doesn't.  This is something I want to fix in
INN 2.4.

>    It seems to me that I'd need to:

>       1.  traverse the spool and find articles that have a Newsgroups:
>           header only listing the cancelled newsgroup; extract the 
>           Message-ID: and remove the file

>           (do I need to remove the reference to the now-deleted newsgroup
>            from the Newsgroups: header if it was cross-posted to 
>            multiple groups?)

I dunno, do you care if it shows up there?  Do you want to delete those
articles?  If not, all you need to do is blow away, in tradspool, all of
the articles in the directory for this newsgroup that have only the
deleted newsgroup in Xref.

>       2.  Remove the corresponding hash from the history file
>       3.  Rebuild the dbz database

This will happen by itself after nightly expire as soon as you delete the
articles out of the spool, although history will keep the message IDs for
the length of /remember/.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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