INN accomplishments

As promised, in the absence of a good working setup for Debian, the weekend (what parts of it I could spare from required domestic chores and optional but fun social activities) was spent working on INN.

I'm down to four messages in inn-workers that I still need to think about before the next INN release, plus 16 in news.software.nntp. Another weekend or two should do it, I hope, and if I'm really lucky and get other things done quickly, it could happen faster.

The big accomplishment for Saturday was getting snapshots working again. The big accomplishment for yesterday was porting overchan to the new overview API and writing a test suite for it (which leaves makehistory, expireover, nnrpd, and innd to port before the old API can be torched). The big accomplishment for today was making cancels immediately eliminate overview information for the article at least with tradindexed, which is a very long-standing problem. I like doing things for Gmane; I think it's a great service, and I like making larsi happy.

(Although it's possible that he's now using Reticule. I've lost track.)

The next big problem with INN that I'd like to get solved is that right now, when using tradindexed overview and tradspool (or timehash, or timecaf too I think) storage, articles in rmgrouped groups are never removed from the spool. They just sit around consuming inodes and disk space and being inaccessible, not to mention lurking ready to bite as soon as the same group rematerializes.

This is kind of bad.

buffindexed does the right thing and has a separate purge cycle of deleted groups that gets rid of all the articles as well. ovdb also has a separate purge cycle, but it doesn't appear to delete the articles. Hm. Probably my fault for setting a bad example. But tradindexed doesn't even have the purge cycle.

I think I know how to fix this. Hopefully I can do it in a clean and minimal way that can be easily backported to STABLE, since this is a bug fix that's really needed. Then I probably also need to provide a tool to go scan through and remove all the old articles. Fun, although generally useful anyway, so I'm not complaining too much. It's probably just another flag for expireover.

I will have to stop thinking about this stuff for a bit, though, as the week is starting and I have to do real work. On the agenda for this week: finish building the new KDCs so that I can do the upgrade next weekend, finish building the Oracle Debian packages, and do some Debian uploads. If I have additional free time, I'll go back to work on remctl.