rnews, inews: Neither has all the features

[Felix E. Klee]

On Sat, 13 Nov 2004 11:05:45 -0800 Russ Allbery wrote:
> > 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.

Thanks for pointing that out.  This indeed is a possibility.

> > 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.

That's good to know.  But not having to use it, would be even better.

I'm still annoyed that rnews doesn't produce a message on stdout or
terminate with a non-zero return value when it cannot post a message.
Instead it uses syslog to "silently" report the error.  That's not of
much use to me, unless there's a simple and efficient way to find
relevant error messages in the corresponding log file.

Felix