"external" expire?

"external" expire?

[Mark Eichin]

Has anyone attempted to either "instrument" expire, so that the files
that would be expired can be handed off to a backup system instead, or
alternately come up with a way of doing the expiration outside of
gnus?  I've got a lot of mail that I'd mostly like to push off to
slower media, but I don't want to confuse nnml by just grabbing the
files out from under it (or would that be ok, esp. if they're not
unread?) 

Re: "external" expire?

[Colin Rafferty]

Mark Eichin writes:

> Has anyone attempted to either "instrument" expire, so that the files
> that would be expired can be handed off to a backup system instead, or
> alternately come up with a way of doing the expiration outside of
> gnus?

I imagine that doing a defadvice to capture the `delete-file' function
would probably be the simplest.  The following would probably work for
nnmail-related backends (nnml, mh):

(defadvice nnml-request-expire-articles (around instrument activate)
  "Advised to do a different kind of delete."
  (let ((nnmail-delete-file-function me:instrument-expire-function))
    ad-do-it))

;; example function
(defvar me:instrument-expire-function
  '(lambda (article)
     (message "deleting %s" article)
     (delete-file article))
  "Instrumentation of expire-article.")

Look at the code to `nnml-request-expire-articles' in nnml.el for a
concept of what I am doing.

-- 
Colin