Henry Spencer:
I've repeatedly considered such a two-phase expire over the years.  The
trouble is that error handling tends to fall down the crack between the
two phases.  What happens if you crash in the middle of expire?  What
happens if some of the articles *can't* be removed?  What happens if some
of them are supposed to be archived, and you run out of space for it?
In all of these cases, you want the history-file processing to reflect
the status of the file operations.

Rich Salz:
I sent patches to Henry or Geoff that added a "-z" flag to the C News
expire so that, like INN, it just wrote the list of files to unlink rather
than actually unlinking them.  It's a BIG win to be able to remove the
articles off-line, and I hope the patch gets incorporated soon.

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