While diagnosing a problem in one of Larry Wall's other projects
(threaded rn), I came to realize that having the full force of Perl to
run killfiles would be nice. Before I embark on such a project, I was
wondering if there's prior art I could steal from.

(I have and use the News::NNTPClient module already, but more for
diagnosing issues, specialized archiving, and rare usage reports.)

Elijah
------
trn4-p77 copes very poorly with 3000 byte overview lines

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
> While diagnosing a problem in one of Larry Wall's other projects
> (threaded rn), I came to realize that having the full force of Perl to
> run killfiles would be nice. Before I embark on such a project, I was
> wondering if there's prior art I could steal from.

Have you thought of storing the news messages in local dirs (like leafnode)
and using fdm?

http://ports.su/mail/fdm

AFAIK is the most flexible tool that exists nowadays for
delivering/filtering/rewriting mail/news messages.

Its syntax resembles perl, and you can use external programs
(in perl or whatever) for rewriting, i.e.:

action "strip-headers" rewrite "reformail -IX-HE-Virus-Scanned: -IX-HE-Spam-Level:"

In comp.lang.perl.misc, Javier <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
> > While diagnosing a problem in one of Larry Wall's other projects
> > (threaded rn), I came to realize that having the full force of Perl to
> > run killfiles would be nice.
>
> Have you thought of storing the news messages in local dirs (like leafnode)
> and using fdm?

I read news from Panix, where I have a Unix shell account with a disk
quota and a local nntp server that can verify who I am with identd
protocol instead of passwords. Leafnode adds a lot of complexity for me:
this is a shared (multiuser) server where I don't have root.

Elijah
------
would also need to compile leafnode to use it

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
>> Have you thought of storing the news messages in local dirs (like leafnode)
>> and using fdm?
>
> I read news from Panix, where I have a Unix shell account with a disk
> quota and a local nntp server that can verify who I am with identd
> protocol instead of passwords. Leafnode adds a lot of complexity for me:
> this is a shared (multiuser) server where I don't have root.

I am not familiar with trn, but I guess you just wanted to play with
the cached NNTP overview files, so you can filter based on
subject/author/references (but you cannot filter on full text).

Even with a limited account in a shell provider having a personalized
news spool and filtering with fdm is doable:

1) The shell might give access to their own news spool in their
filesystem in /var/spool/news and you don't need to fetch the
articles. IIRC that is the case of SDF netbsd shell accounts. If you
can access the news spool in the filesystem you don't need to copy the
articles: just mirror the directory structure for the few groups that
you are interested, and symlink to the articles, don't copy them. You
just need the lndir.sh tool, which is trivial to implement in POSIX
shell. In a tree of symlinks the disk usage is minimal.

2) If the news spool is not accessible in the PANIX filesystem, then
you will need to download the articles, but the size can be reasonable
if you restrict yourself to a few groups and less than a month
retention. Another thing that might help with size is checking
whether the sysadmins let you use a ZFS volume.

3) fdm is just one 250 Kb executable, and it can fetch the news itself
without leafnode. Even with with leafnode, all the binaries together
are < 1 Mb.

That way you have much more fine grain control over filtering/archiving
and you are not tied to a single newsreader.

In comp.lang.perl.misc, Javier <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> I am not familiar with trn, but I guess you just wanted to play with
> the cached NNTP overview files, so you can filter based on
> subject/author/references (but you cannot filter on full text).

I know how to speak NNTP and I know exacty what an overview file is
and the limitations of them.

> Even with a limited account in a shell provider having a personalized
> news spool and filtering with fdm is doable:

It may well be doable in the abstract, but it is not a solution for me.

* I do not want to run as a server. I can't bind to port < 1024 and
I would not want others on localhost to access it.
* I don't want long lived processes, just something that starts, runs,
and finishes when prompted to.
* I do not have disk quota for the amount of news that would me it useful
for me, and Panix does not store any news data in a filesystem I can
access.
* I _do_ have very easy NNTP access: no need for a password or a secure
socket.

> That way you have much more fine grain control over filtering/archiving
> and you are not tied to a single newsreader.

I've been using rn and it's newer versions trn3 and trn4 for about 30
years. I've dabbled with other news readers, but I find the threaded view
of trn is so much better than anything else.

Stock trn does a lousy job with UTF-8, but I'm using a version that
solves that. The patched and stock trn4 has other bugs, though,
including a overview file one that prevents me from running killfiles
in one group.

Elijah
------
it's been a long time since a mounted news spool was common