Currently on PAUSE you have to explicitly delete old uploads.
How about changing it so you have to explicitly KEEP old uploads
that appear to have been superseded?
PAUSE already has a mechanism to delete files at some future point in
time. That's currently only used as part of a safety/sanity check to
delay deletions that were manually invoked.
I envisage PAUSE having a set of rules it would apply monthly, say,
to automatically select files for "purging".
The rules might look something like this:
File does not have deletion date set, and
File is older than 3 months, and
File has a later upload
- in the same directory
- with the same major version
- with a higher minor version
- which is also more than 3 months old
(Naturally these are just suggestions. Let's not bikeshed the fine
details yet. It's the approach we need to discuss first.)
Files selected in this way would be scheduled to be deleted in a month
and an email would be sent to the authors, just as if they'd selected
the files for deletion via PAUSE.
All that's needed, in addition to the above script, is a way for authors
to indicate that a particular file shouldn't be purged. The database
could use a far-future date for that which the UI could present as
"do not purge" checkbox against the file.
Tim.
