The spare space is still retained in the news.dat file in anticipation
that it will be needed again in the future anyway. Rather than to
shrink again at every expiration and grow again at every import, Yarn
0.9x decides to retain and reuse the space.
If you consistently import less than you expire, e.g., you unsubscribed
from a large newsgroup recently, you cut down the expiration period
recently, etc., then news.dat will eventually shrink, but very slowly.
But the idea works in the long run.
You can use the NNIGN program by Tim Middleton <as544@torfree.net> to
look at a usage map of news.dat. <http://www.io.org/~tm/bells2.html>
-- Albert Y.C. Lai trebla@vex.net http://www.vex.net/~trebla/