[INN-COMMITTERS] inn (TODO)

[Jeffrey M. Vinocur]

On Fri, 27 Dec 2002, Russ Allbery wrote:

> Modified: TODO

Some mumblings...


I'm generally bothered by control.ctl (especially lately with the newgroup 
floods).  It should probably be kept in mind when designing the new config 
file to replace newsfeeds/incoming.conf/innfeed.conf, since the 
fundamental (though ephermal) list of "what groups we want to carry" is 
relevant to that new file as well as the replacement for control.ctl.  
(Hmm, random thought:  should the control.ctl replacement be intelligent?  
I mean, some sort of plugin interface to controlchan would allow all sorts 
of interesting functionality.  Besides, just getting rid of the nasty 
special semantics of the third field of control.ctl would be worthwhile
itself.)


The header-only feed reminds me of something that crossed my mind the 
other day.  I'm imagining something like a Message-ID-only feed; probably 
this could be done with MODE CANCEL.  Except that I don't know anything 
about MODE CANCEL, and the documentation in innd(8) is a bit vague.  For 
example, does an attempt to cancel an article that is not found cause the 
cancel to be noted in the history file?  (I see we only allow MODE CANCEL 
locally at present, perhaps the thing to do longterm is to make it 
accessible to some peers as in incoming.conf option?)


> Add a note that -Wcast-qual warnings can't be avoided entirely 

Stupid C.  Grr.  (/me wants qualifier polymorphism)


In the pipedream department:

  * Possible NNTP extension:  Compression of the protocol, using gzip,
    bzip2, or some other technique.  [...]

I wonder if this could somehow be done as a SASL mechanism.  Porbably not,
since SASL doesn't seem to like multiple layers.  Regardless, I'm hoping
we might add an abstraction layer when AUTHINFO SASL is done (since the
write/SSLwrite stuff now is rather messy), and the above TODO item should
probably be kept in mind when designing that abstraction.


-- 
Jeffrey M. Vinocur
jeff at litech.org