[tin-users] Should files in ~/.tin/.news-localhost be cleared out?

[Urs Janßen]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 12:18:54PM +0100, Chris Green wrote:
> I have been looking at my incremental backups and noting what files
> seem to use lots of space by changing frequently.
> 
> There seem to be lots of moderately large and frequently changing
> files in ~/.tin/.news-localhost, currently there are 134 files in
> there, many not changed in several years.

[tin(1)]
...
| GLOBAL OPTIONS MENU AND TINRC CONFIGURABLE VARIABLES
...
|   Cache NNTP overview files locally (cache_overview_files)
|       If ON, create local copies of NNTP overview files. This can be used
|       to  considerably  speed up accessing large groups when using a slow
|       connection.  See also "INDEX FILES". Default is OFF.

> So, two questions:-
> 
>     Should there be some sort of housekeeping to clear these files out
>     at intervals?

| INDEX FILES
...
|      As indexing might take some time you may want to run tin form the sys‐
|      tem batcher cron(1) with the ''-u'' option:
|
|              30 6 * * * /usr/local/bin/tin -u
|
|       If  you  are  low  on  local disk space you should consider to manually
|       purge cached data for groups you are not reading anymore with something
|       like:
|
|              find ${TIN_INDEX_NEWSDIR:-"${TIN_HOMEDIR:-"$HOME"}/.tin"}/.news* \
|              -type f -name "[0-9]*.[0-9]" -atime +28 | xargs rm -f


>     Would the files not be better off in /var somewhere?  Can tin be
>     configured to do this?

| OPTIONS
...
|       -I dir   Directory  in which to store newsgroup index files.
|                Default is ${TIN_INDEX_NEWSDIR:-"${TIN_HOME‐
|                DIR:-"$HOME"}/.tin"}/.news.   This  option has no effect if
|                tin retrieves its index  files  via  NNTP  and cache_over‐
|                view_files is turned off.

urs