nnrp conf

[Russ Allbery]

Edwardo Garcia <wdgarc88 at gmail.com> writes:

> Can we please have the access methods of nnrp,conf brought back!!?!

Hi Edwardo,

I'm very sorry that you ran into a nasty problem because of the complexity
of the readers.conf syntax.

This was something that was much-discussed at the time that readers.conf
was introduced, which was early in my own involvement in INN development.
Some people were unhappy with it for exactly the reasons you name: it's a
fair bit more complicated.  However, the opposing argument at the time was
that it was much more expressive.  There are lots of complicated things
that you can do with readers.conf that were completely impossible with the
old configuration syntax.

For whatever it's worth, the person who wrote the readers.conf parser and
logic and argued successfully for replacing nnrp.access with it did that
work for an ISP that needed more complex access control.

Anyway, none of that really helps you at this point.  In concept, I can
see a lot of appeal in having an alternative, very simple configuration
syntax that didn't require understanding auth and access blocks.  However,
this is water way under the bridge now.  All of the old code was removed
in the INN 2.3.0 release, which was finalized in August of 2000, so it's
been gone for more than 14 years now.  It would be pretty hard to restore
in its original form.

If someone feels up to tackling this, the easiest approach at this point
would probably be to write a program that took the old syntax as input and
converted it to an equivalent readers.conf file.  It's not as good as
being able to use the old syntax directly, but it might provide most of
the benefits and would be considerably less work.

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

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
     <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.