inews and overview

[Russ Allbery]

Pavel V Knyazev <pasha at surnet.ru> writes:

> I'm setting up a webforum-to-news gateway, and it's gonna have no nntp
> readers.

> Everything is almost done but one thing.

> In order to post articles via inews, i have to enable readers in
> inn.conf, since it acts as a reader not a feeder.

> Should i do that i have to enable overview.

> * That is the problem! I don't want to use
> * overview here. How do i get around that?

Basically, use rnews.

> I found that i can still inject news with the rnews utility, but then i
> lose all the functionality of inews and need to generate headers somehow
> and make rnews-ready article.

inews isn't what generates the headers (or shouldn't be; it has some of
that functionality right now, but since it talks to nnrpd, it's just
duplicate code).  But anyway, the headers aren't particularly hard to
generate.  Just add:

    Path: not-for-mail

and then generate a Date header and Message-ID header.  That's all there
is to it.  Usually, on Unix, it's sufficient for message ID generation to
put in the Unix timestamp followed by the PID (and then @ and the
hostname); this works unless you're going to generate more than one
message ID per second.

I can see why you wouldn't want to deal with it, but there are a lot of
libraries and the like that know how to generate dates and message IDs.
Hm.  Although given that they're library routines in INN, it might be nice
(and fairly easy) to add a "post via IHAVE" flag to inews.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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