Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Deleting old news items

[Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@googlemail.com>]

On Sat, 6 Jan 2018 08:18:19 -0500
kuzetsa <kuzetsa@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 01/06/2018 05:05 AM, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> >>>>>> On Sat, 6 Jan 2018, Duncan  wrote:  
> >> $ equery b news.eselect
> >> app-admin/eselect-1.4.10 (/usr/share/eselect/modules/news.eselect)
> >> So in that case it's not the PM, but eselect.  
> > In fact, it is the PM that would do the filtering, before filling
> > the list of unread news items
> > in /var/lib/gentoo/news/news-gentoo.read.
> >
> > Filtering in eselect news would be problematic: Obtaining the list
> > of items with "eselect news list" and e.g. reading them with
> > "eselect news read" are issued as separate commands, which requires
> > that the list of valid items does not change. However, time-based
> > filtering could cause a race condition, like an item expiring
> > between execution of the two commands.
> 
> The race condition could be addressed by issuing a warning
> at or around the time when expirations occur (midnight),
> with or without detecting specific expirations which may
> have occurred:

How accurate is "around"? Obviously we'd need to introduce a user
configuration option so different users could set appropriate values
for their needs.

Seriously though, all this complexity is just highlighting that dates
are a really bad way of deciding when a news item should expire, and
that if we need anything, it's more Display-If conditions.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh