rnews, inews: Neither has all the features

Felix E. Klee felix.klee at inka.de
Sat Nov 13 18:06:10 UTC 2004


Hi,

I need a solution for a problem roughly defined by the following two
requirements:

1. From a script, I want to occasionally post messages to news groups in
   mode "n".

2. I want to know when posting a message fails because the message ID is
   already in the database.  (In this case, I will have the message ID
   changed and the message reposted.  And, yes, there is need for
   handling cases with duplicate message IDs on our system.  I could
   give you an example for a likely scenario where duplicate IDs are
   created.  It has happened in the past.)

Here's what I found so far:

rnews: This one does 1 but doesn't do 2 (it doesn't report to the
    command line when posting failed, even with the parameter "-v").

inews: This one does 2 but doesn't do 1.

grephistory+rnews: This does 1 and 2, but I'm worried about two things:

    a) The execution time of grephistory may be very long for large
       databases.

    b) In between the calls to grephistory and rnews, there would be
       code to update the Message ID if there's a conflict.  During this
       time, a message with a conflicting ID may be posted.  But, in
       reality, this is quite unlikely.

In a nutshell, it boils down to few questions:

I   How is the execution time of grephistory for very large databases (I
    can't test that right now)?

II  May a call to grephistory take much longer than one to rnews?  (I
    doubt it since the news server also needs to check for duplicate
    IDs, maybe using the same code.)

III Is there a solution I missed?

Felix


More information about the inn-workers mailing list