The infamous to-do list

[Bettina Fink]

Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> wrote:

> I've just checked this into CURRENT.  There are plenty of unclaimed
> projects; volunteers are always welcome.  Send mail to inn-workers if you
> want to claim anything, and feel free to offer any additions to this list.
[...]
> * INN really should be capable of both sending and receiving a
>   headers-only feed (or even an overview-only feed) similar to Diablo and
>   using it for the same things that Diablo does, namely clustering,
>   pull-on-demand for articles, and the like.  This should be implementable
>   as a new backend, although the API may need a few more hooks.  Both a
>   straight headers-only feed that only pulls articles down via NNTP from a
>   remote server and a caching feed where some articles are pre-fed, some
>   articles are pulled down at first read, and some articles are never
>   stored locally should be possible.

That (sending and receiving a headers-only feed, caching and pull-
on-demand) would be VERY interesting for bigger and distributed
installations and is one of the only reasons why I'm looking at Diablo.

Some additional notes: 

* The "lost articles" thing: One peer offers mangled articles and
  if you've switch on remembertrash, you'll lose articles because
  the messages ids are blocked in history/precommit cache (There
  should be something like "Unwanted groups and distributions and
  filtered stuff vs obvious/probable syntax errors").

* There is no sample and no documentation for the subscriptions file
  (which is listed on a LIST SUBSCRIPTIONS). As I said, I can write
  a sample and some documentation, but I need help from a native
  speaker. ;-)

* Wishlist for nnrpd/readers.conf (Sorry if I've overlooked something,
  especially the readers.conf is still not my best friend):

     A limit for concurrent parallel reader streams for a user/
     host/IP/group should be definable.

     A download limit (KB/sec) for a user/host/IP/group should be
     definable.

     This becomes more and more important for us with all that DSL
     and "flatrate" stuff.

     A limit for "maximum of posted articles per day" should be
     definable for a user/host/IP/group. I guess that this can probably
     be done with the filter or backoff stuff, but as far as I under-
     stood backoff that's only for slowing down high-volume posters.

* It would be nice if "feed classes" or "feed groups" can be defined
  in newsfeeds.

  As an example:

  class non-binary {
  	groups: *, at alt.binaries*,!control,!control.*,!junk
        distributions: !local
	size: <50000
	flags: G8,H5,Ap,Tm
	}

  class usenet2 {
        groups: @*,net.*
	distributions: 4gh
	flags: Ad,Ap,Tm
	}
     
  peer1/peer1.path.name:\
  <non-binary>:innfeed!

  peer2/peer2.path.name:\
  <usenet2>:innfeed!

  peer3/peer3.path.name:\
  <usenet2>:innfeed!

  So you don't have to type all the stuff again for each similar peer.

 Bye,
 Bettina