[PATCH 0/4] Improve delayer

[Christoph Biedl]

Julien ÉLIE wrote...

> 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?

Certainly not.

> > +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.

Yes. In regular operation, the delay value is rather a minimum.[1] It may
increase to a huge amount of time if no other line arrives on stdin.
However, news.daily will restart all feeds, so that's the upper limit in
practice.

[1] And the exception, when the input is closed (usually via some ctlinnd),
then entire queue is sent right away. I implemented that storage option
for a reason.

> 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.

Um, do you mean an upper time limit a line may be queued? Should be
doable, but I got burnt more than once from fiddling with alarm, read,
select and the things that need to be done for this. So I'll happily
leave that to someone else.

Thanks for your kind words,

    Christoph