The infamous to-do list

[Aidan Cully]

On Sat, Jun 24, 2000 at 03:09:18AM, Russ Allbery said:
> * Add man pages for the default authenticators, as well as documentation
>   on the readers.conf external program interface.

As I said in the newsgroup, there's a start of this in
authprogs/README.readers.conf.

> * Currently, if open returns a file descriptor higher than select can
>   handle (such as on a Solaris system where the maximum file descriptor
>   limit has been increased above 1024 in /etc/system), INN will crash in a
>   fairly nasty fashion.  It may be possible to check this by comparing
>   with FD_SETSIZE.

What about having INN maintain the FD numbers itself, using dup2()?
it's hard to make syslog() cooperate, but there are assumptions you can
(probably) make that can allow it...

> * Add authentication via SASL to nnrpd.  This is a boatload of additional
>   issues, particularly if we want to add authentication methods like
>   Kerberos that require their own separate libraries.  Best to start with
>   just the basic framework and the required authentication type and then
>   see what other people contribute.

Cyrus libsasl?

> * External authenticators should also be able to do things like return a
>   list of groups that a person is allowed to read or post to.  Currently,
>   maintaining a set of users and a set of groups, each of which some
>   subset of the users is allowed to access, is far too difficult.  For a
>   good starting list of additional functionality that should be made
>   available, look at everything the Perl authentication hooks can do.

I think this waits for the config system rewrite.

> * Allow nnrpd to spawn long-running helper processes.  Not only would this
>   be useful for handling authentication (so that the auth hooks could work
>   without execing a program on every connection), but it may allow for
>   other architectures for handling requests (such as a pool of helpers
>   that deal only with overview requests).  [Aidan Culley has ideas along
>   these lines.]

I'd like nnrpd to *be* a long-running helper process.  And to support
that, I'd like innd to be able to feed file-descriptors to newsfeeds.
I just haven't figured out how to do that, within the context of INN...
Supporting long-running helper processes *inside* nnrpd would be much
easier without needing to worry about individual nnrpds being forked
off willy-nilly by innd, or inetd.  (i.e., with a master nnrpd process.)

--aidan
-- 
Aidan Cully       "You can't find your waitress/ With a geiger counter..
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