XPost: alt.free.newsservers, news.software.nntp
From: eagle@eyrie.org
coyo writes:
> Looks like Diablo and INN are the two big choices. However, I wish I was
> a better programmer. It looks like a modern Usenet server and modern
> Usenet client would really come in handy.
There's a bunch of things that I'd change about INN if I were writing it
from scratch today. (Probably the biggest one is that I'd build it around
libevent or libev from the start.) But, that said, INN CURRENT does have
an implementation of most of the new stuff, if that's what you're looking
for. Its age shows a bit in its array of C, Perl, and shell, but I think
it still does a fairly decent job.
Most of the "problem" with it is that it's got a giant toolkit of
attachable tools, all of which are useful in some circumstances, but which
aren't very coherent at times in things like, oh, using the same
configuration syntax. And you have to make choices like whether to use
nntpsend/innxmit or innfeed, which are choices mostly for historical
reasons and in a brand new design would probably all be the same tool with
some flexible modes of operation.
If you don't care about handling binaries and the full flood of binary
groups, you could certainly write a much simpler server than INN. A lot
of INN is offloaded into multiple participating processes and relatively
complex on-disk data structures and event loops purely for efficiency and
speed. You could probably write something workable for text-only groups
in a much higher-level language and have it be quite a bit smaller.
(An NNTP implementation in Haskell would be rather neat.)
--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org)
Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
explains why.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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