rnews, inews: Neither has all the features

[Russ Allbery]

Felix E Klee <felix.klee at inka.de> writes:

> 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.

inews will work if you grant the host that's running inews the appropriate
access permissions.  See the L access permission set by the access: key in
readers.conf.  It's covered in the readers.conf man page.

> 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.

grephistory is extremely fast; the history database is essentially a hash
table and lookups have to be as fast as possible.  It can generally give
you an answer in six or seven disk reads.

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

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
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