Multiple overviews

[Heath Kehoe]

>  For various reasons I would like to have several "world views" of a
>single article base. To some extent any partial view will be imperfect,   
>since articles not in overview will still be available to some degree, but
>the intent is pruning articles which the user doesn't want to see, not    
>censorship.
>  
>  That clarified, is there any reason I can't send a subset of articles to
>overchan, and force overchan to use another directory other than the one  
>used by innd, and start an nnrpd daemon pointing at a config file using   
>that overview...
>  
>  In other words, is it possible by clever (or warped) config to do this,
>without having to generate new code which is unlikely to be of use or
>interest to most people, read as "anyone else on earth", or is it just a
>passing fancy? And what flavors of overview does overchan support?
>

You can set the INNCONF environment variable to a pathname of an alternate
inn.conf.  For example, you could create an alternate inn.conf that
was a copy of the real one, but with pathoverview set differently.
(If using buffindexed, also set pathetc to a different dir that has the
alternate buffindexed.conf; and link in the other pathetc files).

Then make a little script called, say, 'altoverchan':

#!/bin/sh
INNCONF=/alternate/inn.conf
export INNCONF
exec /path/to/overchan "$@"

And put 'altoverchan' in newsfeeds in place of 'overchan'.

Overchan uses the same overview API that innd uses, so you can use
any of the overview methods with it.

-h