Hey all:

Apologies in advance for this rant.

I just finished figuring out (and fixing) a problem with Usenet
news and the latest Debian woody innd/suck/rpost setup.  After
hitting the debian.* groups on DejaGoo I was able to find some
discussion of the problem:

  http://groups.google.com/groups?th=8886d4b6c4d9c777
  http://groups.google.com/groups?th=7fcf6e446e25b876

but very little discussion of solutions, apart from "use the
packaged script".  My solution follows closely the "packaged"
solution, but I didn't want the cruft that went with it.  If
there's anyone listening who knows more about this than me,
please chime in.

Here's the problem.  The "newsfeeds" file tells innd what to
do with outgoing news.  It has lines like:

  sitename:pattern:flag:param

in particular, mine has a line like:

  news.real-time.com:!junk,!control*,!local*:Tf,Wn:

which means roughly, post articles to real-time's news server,
using a file feed (Tf) with articles formatted as filenames
in the feed (Wn).  The heart of the problem is that the meaning
of "Wn" is different in innd2.3; newsfeeds(5) now says:

  {W}n     Token of the article

The upshot of this change is that where rpost was expecting a
filename in its batch file, it is now given a token, and a "file
not found" error rears up.  Documentation of exactly what a
token is is thin, but sm(8) and history(5) give more details.

One solution to this is to use rpost's message filtering hook to
"filter" the token into a proper news article.  The put-news
script distributed with suck (in /usr/lib/suck/) uses this method
via the -f SCRIPT $$o arguments, e.g.:

  rpost -f myfilter.sh \$\$o=/tmp/rpost \$\$i /tmp/rpost

where myfilter.sh has code like:

  #!/bin/sh
  INFILE=$1
  OUTFILE=$2
  INFILE=`echo ${INFILE} | sed "s,.*/,,"`
  /usr/lib/news/bin/sm $INFILE > $OUTFILE

Note that the sed command is *required* because rpost still adds
the article batch path to the token, since it assumes each batch
file entry is a file, even though it's now a token.  :-P

<editorial>
Ordinarily I'm happy with Debian.  I suppose that since this is
an x.0 release, quirks are expected.  This bizarre change in inn2
is pretty bad though.
</editorial>

<quote from packaged 'put-news' script>
using inn2.3, we need to use sm, which translates inn 2.3's concept
of an article token into something which we can use.  *sigh*.  And
the infile isn't really a file, it's a mangled token.  Kludge.
</quote>

-- 
trammell at el-swifto.com  9EC7 BC6D E688 A184 9F58  FD4C 2C12 CC14 8ABA 36F5
Twin Cities Linux Users Group (TCLUG) Mailing List http://www.mn-linux.org
Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota                irc.openprojects.net #tclug