rc.news: checking whether we run as the news user

[Russ Allbery]

Noel Butler <noel.butler at ausics.net> writes:
> On 19/10/2014 13:39, Russ Allbery wrote: 

>> I don't think I ever said explicitly here, but I think it would be fine
>> tochange users. However, that's rather hard to do safely. I suppose we

> How can that be hard to do safely?

Because it's a shell script.  Changing the user a running shell script is
running as requires doing things like re-execing itself under su, which is
tricky to get right.

> I think the issue here is rc.news is wrongly named, since most sys
> admins would see that and say, oh ok, that goes in (or links to)
> /etc/rc.d or /etc/<insert_your_os's_init_dir> and call it as rc.news
> start|stop|restart etc, but clearly this is however not what rc.news is
> for, requiring a wrapper to call it, change to user news before calling
> that script.

Yes, I agree with that.  rc.news is actually start-inn, and this would all
be much less confusing if it had been named that originally.  (It's not
start-innd -- doing that is easy.  It's all the other machinery that it
takes care of, including things like recovering after various problems and
starting various optional supporting daemons, that make it complicated.)

> Someone recently mentioned about time management in getting things
> running, usually if something doesn't work after an hour or two of
> effort from start to end-user usable, I piss it off and find something
> else that does, and I know I'm not alone in that mindset, since I
> consider anything that complex to get going would be a nightmare to
> problem solve should the need arise.

It's okay if you find some other news server that you like better.  No one
will mind!  It's not a commercial product, you're not paying us, nothing
depends on you using INN, and it honestly doesn't make any difference to
me whether you use INN or not.  :)  If you're not having fun, don't use
it!  The last thing anyone here wants to do is add more pain to your life.

One thing to realize with INN that this is a software package that's been
around for a really, really long time, and is now kept alive basically as
a hobby by a very small number of people, none of whom have a great deal
of time to spend on it.  There's oodles and oodles of things that could be
done to improve INN; that's absolutely undisputed.  I actually stopped
writing them down after I accumulated several vast lists.  At this point,
we all just work on whatever looks fun in that moment, or whatever fixes
problems for us, and don't sweat it too much any more.  One of the nice
things about being a fairly small corner of the Internet is that there
isn't a lot of drama, there rarely are any huge arguments, and there's no
real time pressure to make anything work.

I'd love, in the abstract, for INN to be the greatest news server ever and
totally simple for anyone to install and get running, but I came to terms,
a long time ago, with the fact that I have neither the time nor the
resources required to do all the things that I think would be needed for
that statement to be true.  It is what it is.  :)

> So something that requires minimal fuss, would be used, recommended to
> others when asked for opinions, and the software becomes more popular as
> word of mouth helps propagate it, so basically making it as easy to use
> as possible will help the newbies, not frustrate them into using
> software X instead of yours.

I'm perfectly okay with you using software X!  Absolutely nothing wrong
with that.

-- 
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.