[PATCH 0/4] Improve delayer

[Julien ÉLIE]

Hi Christoph,

> a while ago I re-discovered the delayer as a way to increase efficiency
> of NoCeM notice handling: By deliberately delaying articles from the
> well-known spam site, the NoCeMs will arrive first, blocking the spam's
> Message-IDs. As a result, users will not see the spam at all.
> 
> However, I found this little program could need some love, so there's
> some code cleanup, documentation, and a bugfix. And new features, most
> notably persistence for the lines not sent yet.

Thanks for your 4 patches.  I've quickly had a look, and they look fine 
to me.  I'll commit them within a few days.

Now that the delayer script has proper documentation, been thoroughly 
tested, and got a few useful new flags, I suggest putting it into the 
backends directory and officially installing it.
Any objection about that?



> Also, as I'm not
> a native English speaker, my wording might be weird or misleading.

Neither am I :)



> +This program implements a delaying pipe. Lines sent to the process
> +are spooled and printed after the given delay time has passed.
If I understand well how the script works, all the spooled lines are 
printed at the same time when the given delay time has passed.  It means 
that articles are in fact delayed by a time between 0 and the next 
arrival of an article after the delay time.
I can explicitly add that to the documentation if you confirm it.

I'm wondering whether we should not implement a minimal delayed time for 
a line before being sent, for the script to be even more efficient.

-- 
Julien ÉLIE

« – I see the world didn't end yesterday.
   – Are you sure? » (Alan Moore, _Watchmen_)